IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/osfxxx/xnez5_v1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

(Ch)eating for oneself or cheating for others? Experimental evidence from young politicians and students in Kenya

Author

Listed:
  • Hoffmann, Lisa

    (German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA))

Abstract

Honesty and orientation toward the common good are key qualities that people expect from their elected politicians. However, dishonesty in the forms of corruption, vote-buying and identity politics are not uncommon and can lead to a loss of trust in politics. This paper focuses on the cheating behavior of aspirant politicians and students in Kenya. I applied online coin flip experiments as means to detect cheating. In a between-subject design, participants could either (1) cheat to the benefit of a common good, (2) cheat to the benefit of their ethnic group, or (3) cheat to their own monetary advantage. On average, 38% of participants report the payoff-maximizing number of successful coin tosses with no difference between aspirant politicians and students. However, aspirant politicians report the payoff-maximizing outcome more readily than students when cheating benefits a common good. Perceiving corruption as justifiable is correlated with reporting higher numbers of successful coin tosses in the online experiment.

Suggested Citation

  • Hoffmann, Lisa, 2023. "(Ch)eating for oneself or cheating for others? Experimental evidence from young politicians and students in Kenya," OSF Preprints xnez5_v1, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:xnez5_v1
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/xnez5_v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/6412ea3fc747230dd510ae57/
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/xnez5_v1?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:osfxxx:xnez5_v1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://osf.io/preprints/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.