IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/9ch2d_v1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Identity and Corruption: A Laboratory Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Cubel, Maria
  • Papadopoulou, Anastasia
  • Sanchez-Pages, Santiago

Abstract

This paper explores the role of identity in voters’ decision to retain corrupt politicians. We build up a model of electoral accountability with pure moral hazard and bring it to the lab. Politicians must decide whether to invest in a public project with uncertain returns or to keep the funds for themselves. Voters observe the outcome of the project but not the action of the politician; if the project is unsuccessful, they do not know whether it was because of bad luck or because the politician embezzled the funds. We run two treatments; a control treatment and a treatment where subjects are assigned an identity using the minimal group paradigm. Our main result is that, upon observing a failed project, voters approve politicians of their same identity group significantly more often than in the control and compared to politicians of a different group. This is partially driven by a belief on same-identity politicians being more honest. We also observe that subjects acting as politicians are much more honest than expected by the equilibrium prediction.

Suggested Citation

  • Cubel, Maria & Papadopoulou, Anastasia & Sanchez-Pages, Santiago, 2022. "Identity and Corruption: A Laboratory Experiment," SocArXiv 9ch2d_v1, Center for Open Science.
  • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:9ch2d_v1
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/9ch2d_v1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/6324a3585e9d52013f1f5185/
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/9ch2d_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:socarx:9ch2d_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://arabixiv.org .

    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.