Discussion

The price of accountability: corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

ekjhgkejhgk: Well obviously.

retep_kram: It looks like a tautology to me. Like: "Corruption erodes social trust in places where social trust exist and is key for the political system."

gmerc: What you're saying is that with the shift to autocracy, all these trust problems will become manageable?

bryanrasmussen: once you know the way to solve problems is to pay off the people with power you start to trust people again, because things are working the way you were told they would.

bryanrasmussen: This does sort of feel like the kind of thing I might think and wonder about and then do a lot of work doing a study and some research and writing up an article and in the end everyone says "yeah, no duh!"

brookst: So following this through, does it mean that autocracy is the preferred government for a country that sleepwalked past the tipping point where corruption is entrenched because the institutions that could uproot it are themselves deeply corrupt?

mrktf: or in other words: people in power are corrupt, but they usually are corrupt equally for everybody.

catlifeonmars: [delayed]

lm28469: I think culture and education play much bigger roles than anything else, all the sources I find show Germany and France having similar level of corruption (on top of being geographically and economically close) but completely different level of "social trust".China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tellhttps://ourworldindata.org/corruptionhttps://ourworldindata.org/trust

himata4113: People generally are saying the same thing, the more trust exists the more you got to lose.However, it's not that simple there's a different kind of trust that comes with these types of social structures and they usually trust that as long as they keep their head down nothing will change. You can obviously draw parallels with conservatives here, but in reality people more often than not just want to live their life.Democracies tend to be a lot more active politically and promote transparency so there is trust that your government is being transparent and that your vote matters. Of course if you find out that your political activism and votes don't accomplish anything due to corruption you check out and start disliking your government. Autocracies don't have political movements to begin with (exceptions apply) so it is way less impactful. There's way more comparisons to be made, but in general they roughly boil down to the same thing.

dzink: You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is essential for business transactions and specifically for long term investments. You can make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).

the__alchemist: I have been thinking about this more and more the past few points, to the point where I feel like I have to run for office as a social duty. (USA) There are so few politicians who give more than lip service to stopping corruption.Our districts are embarrassing. People tolerating the blatant corruption by the Trump administration is something I don't understand. They will get upset about Epstein, but don't care about the corruption. (See for example the recent Jared Kushner contracts for one of many examples) Congress campaigns funded by PACs.Phrases of interest: "Conflict of interest". "Shame". It is wild how people still vote for corrupted politicians, which is almost all of them. My parents are the prototype. If you take money from corporate-funded interests, you still have a conflict of interest, even if you aren't caught acting in the favor of those corporations.

PepperdineG: I think of the recent study with raccoons how they like to solve puzzles. That was something well-known but not actually scientifically demonstrated and measured until now.

GZGavinZhao: Did you meant to write "You *can't* make massive leaps in technology or medicine" instead of *can*?

SanjayMehta: BS data is BS. On what basis have they classified each country as a democracy or an autocracy?

cucumber3732842: Are we living in the same reality?Look at how business works in the rich west works. Everything is formalized with contracts, risk is portioned out and offloaded to every party under the sun. You bring in people with licenses and accreditation, 3rd party consultants, etc, etc. All of this work and expense is incurred so that if things go wrong then the parties all have precisely defined ways in which they can (expensively) drag the matter through a courtroom and whatever comes of that will be enforced with state violence.Contrast with (certain parts of) the far east and eastern europe. The west is the low trust environment.

tw04: Your response just proves his point. All of that paperwork, all of those contracts- that assumes you can trust the government to fairly enforce the law.In a society where corruption rules, you have no reason to spend time and money on any of that because you know you’re one bribe away from it all being kindling for your next bonfire.So yes, in areas with low corruption they don’t bother. They either just set aside some cash to pay off whatever official they need to if things go sideways, or they hire the local judge’s son to an empty position of power so that they can win anything that goes to “court”. That’s not a sign of high trust, that’s an acknowledgment there’s no point in bothering.

rob74: > China's pretty corrupt politically but the social trust is quite high, the highest outside of northern europe as far as I can tellThere are a few reasons for that that I can imagine:- China is one of very few autocracies that has managed to significantly improve the standard of living of most of its population.- The public trials and (sometimes) executions of allegedly corrupt individuals might help improve the perception of corruption.- The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have, even if the poll is supposedly "confidential" and "only for scientific purposes".

ses1984: >The same harsh penalties mentioned above might influence people to declare a higher level of social trust than they actually have.This 100%.Political imprisonment and reeducation camps are antithetical to any definition of a high trust society that I would subscribe to.

ses1984: We are probably meant to assume ceteris paribus and only vary the dimension of corruption.I think you’re right that culture plays a key role. For example if small bribes are customary, that doesn’t erode trust, that’s just the way things are.

throawayonthe: > From V-Dem, we use two measures of democratic quality: the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification and the Liberal Democracy Index. The RoW (Lührmann et al., 2018) is a categorical measure distinguishing closed autocracies (no multiparty elections), electoral autocracies (multiparty elections that are not free and fair), electoral democracies (free elections but limited liberal protections), and liberal democracies (free elections with strong liberal protections).by "democracy" they of course mean liberalism

PunchyHamster: Kinda; authoritarism runs on bribes and nepotism, of course corruption would have lesser effect here, it's expected