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Corruption tolerance as a process of moral, social, and political cognition: evidence from Latin America

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Abstract

While corruption is commonly understood in behavioral terms, the dominance of political and economic approaches has hindered the integration of relevant psychological insights into the (anti-)corruption mainstream, causing a rift between the examination of social determinants and their assessment within a process of individual decision-making. The present study offers a model that combines moral, social, and political factors to explore the cognitive processes behind corruption tolerance, operationalized here as attitudinal, intended, and behavioral responses to a bribery event. Using data from 1651 survey respondents across Latin America, it empirically tests the impact of key variables over the formation of individual attitude, intention, and behavior, taking into account the conditions and situations in which it arises. The results show that the decision to engage in petty bribery responds significantly and consistently to the individual’s tendency toward moral disengagement, and the centrality of their moral identity.

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Notes

  1. For the purpose of this study, corruption is understood as any morally deviant action resulting from the abuse of entrusted power for private gain; the immorality of the act, in turn, need not transgress any formal or informal practices. Therefore, an individual’s moral approval of, or willing participation in, a corrupt event will be considered to represent tolerance of corruption regardless of the extent of corruption and the impunity enjoyed by wrongdoers in a given context.

  2. While an exclusive focus on bribery—to the detriment of information regarding other forms of corruption such as embezzlement, nepotism, abuse of office, and others—limits the scope of applicability of this study, it follows current voices in the field who stress the need to transition away from general discussions of corruption and toward actionable evidence on specific types (Heywood, 2017; Ang, 2020).

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Acknowledgment

Data collection and earlier drafts of this paper were carried out at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) of Kyoto University and with the support of the Graduate School of International Development (GSID) of Nagoya University.

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  1. School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, Yamadaoka 1-2, Suita, 565-0871, Japan

    Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez

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Correspondence to Joseph Pozsgai-Alvarez.

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Table 9 Distribution of survey participants by country, age, and gender
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Pozsgai-Alvarez, J. Corruption tolerance as a process of moral, social, and political cognition: evidence from Latin America. Crime Law Soc Change 77, 381–404 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-021-09995-6

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