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Coethnicity and Corruption: Field Experimental Evidence from Public Officials in Malawi

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2019

Brigitte Seim Open the ORCID record for Brigitte Seim [Opens in a new window]  and
Amanda Lea Robinson Open the ORCID record for Amanda Lea Robinson [Opens in a new window]
Brigitte Seim*
Affiliation:
Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
Amanda Lea Robinson
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: bseim@ad.unc.edu
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Abstract

Corruption is widespread in many developing countries, though public officials’ discretion in the solicitation of bribes may expose some citizens to more corruption than others. We derive expectations about how shared ethnicity between government officials and citizens should influence the likelihood of bribe solicitation. We evaluate these expectations through a field experiment in which Malawian confederates seek electricity connections from real government offices – an interaction that is often accompanied by bribe solicitation. Our field experiment exogenously varied coethnicity between the official and the confederate. We find that coethnicity increases the likelihood of expediting an electricity connection, both with and without a bribe, which we interpret as evidence of parochial corruption.

Keywords

Corruptionethnic identityethnicityparochialfield experimentMalawi
Type
Short Report
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 61 - 66
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019 

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Footnotes

The authors contributed equally, and the ordering of the authors’ names reflects the principle of rotation across a series of articles. We are grateful to many colleagues for providing ideas and guidance on this project, especially Clark Gibson, Guy Grossman, Nahomi Ichino, Vlad Kogan, Paul Lagunes, Vittorio Merola, Jan Pierskalla, Nicholas Obradovich, and Pablo Querubin. The project also benefited from feedback at the 2014 NYU CESS Experimental Political Science Conference and the Comparative Politics Workshop at the Ohio State University. We especially wish to thank the dedicated and thoughtful team of research assistants in Malawi, who we do not list by name for their own protection. This research received human subjects approval from the Ohio State University Human Research Protection Program (HRPP), the University of California, San Diego’s Institutional Review Board, and the Malawi National Commission for Science and Technology’s (NCST) Committee on Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities. A pre-analysis plan for this study was filed with Open Science Framework prior to data collection and is available at http://goo.gl/OQRbWW. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi: 10.7910/DVN/N1HOB1. The authors have no conflicts of interest to report.

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