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Corruption: a situational action view

Published onJan 15, 2025
Corruption: a situational action view
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Abstract

This article presents an integrative, analytic, and interactive approach to explaining corruption. We find that extant research, while empirically rich, often lacks grounding on the micro level of analysis, operates on unspecified or implausible decision-making models, does not clearly distinguish between proximal and distal causes, and does not attempt to study the interactions between individual propensities and corruption-conducive settings (situational analysis). The theoretical traditions of rational choice and culture provide insight into some but not all corrupt acts, and are limited in the extent to which they explain why and how an individual chooses to act corruptly. Drawing on analytic criminology, we propose situational action theory (SAT) as an alternative explanation of corruption as moral action that forefronts rule guidance, conditional relevance of controls, and the interplay of people and settings. This conceptual framework will allow researchers to build on existing empirical work while distinguishing causes of corruption from its mere correlates. The article concludes with some reflections on bridging the gap between situational theory and empirical research into corruption.

Introduction

Why do people engage in corruption? A review of the literature identifies a large number of correlates of corruption, including government size (Goel & Nelson, 1998), descriptive norms (Köbis et al., 2015), hierarchically organized religions (La Porta et al. 1997), the percentage of women in government (Dollar et al., 2001) familism (Lipset & Lenz, 2000), gender (Lambsdorff et al., 2011), voting district size (Persson et al., 2003), salary levels of public officials (van Rijckeghem & Weder, 2001), nostalgia (Li et al., 2023) and many more. However, how these variables, alone or in concert, might move individuals to engage in corruption remains poorly understood. Proximate and distal causes, consequences and spurious correlations are rarely sufficiently distinguished theoretically or empirically.

Theory guidance, when incorporated, tends to utilize a version of rational choice perspective (RCP). However, RCP’s lack of specific and hence falsifiable predictions about how the combined influence of person and setting characteristics lead to corrupt acts as well as its neglect of cognitive mechanisms that generate behaviour, largely disqualify it as an adequate action theory (Treiber, 2017a; Wikström & Treiber, 2015, Herrmann, 2024). Instead, RCP should perhaps be viewed as a predictive tool rather than a testable theory (Cornish & Clarke, 2017). Alternatively, important theoretical work has focused on the influence of culture and norms on corrupt behaviour. However, beyond characterizing the environments or settings that make corruption more likely, these cultural approaches largely neglect individual differences, person-setting interactions, and the mental processes that move individuals to corrupt acts.

This article critically reviews the dominant theoretical approaches in the corruption literature (rational choice and cultural). The critique we advance is informed by key theoretical debates in analytic sociology and criminology, and applied to the theoretical landscape of corruption research. In doing so, we highlight that corruption research lacks a unifying and testable theory which 1) specifies micro-level mechanisms that explain why corrupt acts happen, 2) identifies and distinguishes distal from proximate causes of corruption, and 3) takes seriously the importance of the interplay of person and setting characteristics. To overcome this predicament, we present the analytic framework of Situational Action Theory (SAT; Wikström, 2010; Treiber, 2011; Wikström et al., 2012; Wikström, 2014; Wikström & Treiber, 2015; Wikström et al., 2024) as an alternative to how corruption has previously been theorized and researched. SAT aims to explain why people come to see and choose crime as an alternative and promises to bridge the gap between people- and environment-based explanations by showing how their interaction shapes perception and choice, while distinguishing distal (emergent/developmental) from proximal (situational) causes of corruption. Moreover, by focusing on the mechanisms (person-setting interactions and mental processes) linking putative causes to behaviour, it moves from mere prediction towards an explanatory account of the corrupt act. SAT’s set of testable implications can inform theory driven research to further improve theory, and ultimately contribute to a better understanding of one of the greatest problems faced by societies around the globe today.

Recentring the Debate

Corruption can be defined as ‘behaviour of public officials which deviates from accepted norms in order to serve private ends’ (Huntington 1989, p. 377) and violates standards of impartiality (Kurer, 2005). Examples include teachers who accept or solicit bribes for better grades, police officers who use their status to benefit from organized crime, and government officials who embezzle public funds or allocate government contracts to non-competitive firms owned by family members or friends. Whilst corruption is clearly defined as a behaviour, it is striking that most corruption researchers do not study behaviour. Instead, they focus on corruption rates as a country-level phenomenon, with cross-national comparisons being the method of choice. Easily available data on each country’s corruption perception index (CPI; Transparency International, 2022) has allowed researchers to identify countless correlates, ranging from the proportion of female lawmakers to per capita alcohol intake (Rothstein & Holmberg, 2011). With the exuberant use of the CPI, country-level indicators have dominated empirical research, with not enough attention being paid to the fact that aggregate values reflect a sum of individual events (Coleman, 1986). As Tavits (2005, p. 2) reminds us:

Corruption is ultimately the direct result of decisions, choices and behavior at the level of the individual. One can restructure institutions or political systems, but if individual-level motivations for corrupt behavior are not understood, these restructurings may not be effective.

Studying how individual acts of corruption come about presents a series of methodological and theoretical challenges that cannot be met using aggregate data. The action is at the micro-level, where researchers face the challenge of modelling the unobserved decision-making mechanism behind acts of corruption. The mechanism refers to the process through which the interplay of proximate, putative causes produces the behavioural outcome (Wikström & Kroneberg, 2022; see also Bunge, 2004). For instance, it is difficult to see how a higher level of alcohol intake at the country level causes acts of corruption. In the absence of a plausible mechanism, such correlates are unlikely to have any proximate causal significance. The causal chain linking major structural or cultural phenomena to total corruption can only be understood through an adequate action theory – a plausible explication of why people decide to act corruptly – which connects corrupt officials to their corrupt behavior (Bunge, 2004). Only such a specified mechanism can explain how individual characteristics, organizational cultures or incentive structures lead to corrupt acts. We thus submit that any theory aiming to causally explain corruption must explain the action-generating mechanism.

This condition filters out correlation-based ‘theories’ which take statistical association or temporal precedence for proof of causal efficacy without specifying the underlying mechanics of action. It is rarely acknowledged that not all correlates are causes and not all causes are immediate (proximal). De Graaf (2007, p. 59) aptly summarised this kind of research:

'The variables considered are on all possible levels: individual, organizational and societal. For example, campaign finance practices in the United States, or longevity in power by elected officials, or economic development and ‘being a former British colony’. Then it is claimed that these factors are somehow ‘causes’ of corruption.

This is not to deny the possibility of a causal sequence leading, for example, from the sociohistorical impact of British colonialism to current-day corruption levels (Treisman, 2000). But to posit such a sequence requires an undertaking to unpack the cogs and wheels of the processes linking colonialism to individual acts of corruption. All too often scholars of corruption have left black boxes unopened or even unacknowledged and only a fraction of what has been written on corruption possesses the analytic qualities required for (social) scientific explanation (Graeff, 2016).

Alongside the lack of an adequate action theory capable of distinguishing distal from proximate causes of corruption is another, less recognised problem with most explanatory approaches to corruption that focus on attributes of people and places, rather than situations. Situations involve the convergence of people and settings, and situational analysis is concerned with person-environment interaction (Lewin, 1936; Wikström et al., 2012; Hardie, 2020). Much corruption research identifies individual, country or organisational risk factors, but struggles to specify their interplay. This type of explanation is known in corruption research as ‘bad apples’ theories (Ashforth et al., 2008), or ‘bad barrels’ theories (Kish-Gephart et al., 2010). ‘Bad apples’ theories focus on character deficiencies conducive to corruption, e.g., moral attitudes and personality traits (e.g., Tavits, 2010; Agbo & Iwundu, 2016; Zhao et al., 2016; Vranka & Bahník, 2018). In contrast, ‘bad barrels’ theories are concerned with the influence of macro (country), meso (organizational), or micro (setting) norms and culture (e.g., Jha & Panda, 2017; Köbis et al., 2022; Victor & Cullen, 1988). We agree that identifying key person and setting/environmental characteristics related to corrupt behaviour or aggregates of corruption is an important first step. However, we insist that these approaches, which draw the causal arrows directly from characteristics of individuals or environments to the corrupt act (De Graaf, 2007), still fail to explain why people act the way they do. This is because they offer no clear vision about how the various putative causes interact, and which decision processes link these interactions to behaviour. Hence, situational analysis, which examines in detail how personal and environmental factors interact and influence behaviour, remains underutilised.

When corruption researchers do study both people and settings, an additive relationship is typically assumed – ‘personal’ risk factors are added to ‘situational’ (read: environmental or setting) risk factors (e.g., Powpaka, 2002). As De Graaf (2007, p. 59) cautions:

If we were to add up all the claimed variance of these factors in all the research that can be grouped here, it would not be surprising if we found a causal construction in which well over 100 percent of variance would be explained.

In summary, we have argued that key issues with academic explanations of corruption are that they i) are missing micro-level theory of action and commit ecological fallacies (Piantadosi et al., 1988), whereby macro- or meso-level patterns are projected onto individuals, situations and corrupt acts; ii) often fail to distinguish between distal and proximate cause of why corrupt acts occur; and iii) lack situational analysis explaining the interplay of personal factors (bad apples) and environmental factors (bad barrels). These limitations are widespread within the paradigms that have dominated corruption research for decades: rational choice and cultural theories. Here, we consider the limitations of these theoretical traditions in greater detail before offering an alternative theoretical framework which aims to overcome the key theoretical issues we discuss.

Rational Choice

At face value, many forms of corruption constitute an economic exchange of the do ut facias type, i.e. I give that you may do. For instance, the corruptor offers a bribe in the hope that this would earn him or her an unfair advantage and the bribee grants that advantage as an act of reciprocity. The transactional nature of corruption has attracted generations of economists to study ‘the trade in decisions that should not be for sale’ (Søreide & Rose-Ackerman 2017, p.195), and encouraged a rational-choice perspective, promising ‘a substantial progress in a study of corruption’ to those who ‘take tastes and values as given and perceive individuals as rational beings attempting to further their self-interest’ (Rose-Ackerman 1978, p. 5; see also Klitgaard 1997). According to the rational-choice perspective, corruption happens when its proceeds outweigh the costs of punishment discounted by the risk of detection (Becker & Stigler, 1974). Viewing corruption in this way is not without advantage. Regardless of whether the rational-choice approach is accurate,1 its methodological individualism of the rational choice approach accomplishes what a plethora of research in the same field fails to: establish a theory of why people act as they do (Wikström & Kroneberg, 2022). Unlike studies that persistently regress aggregate corruption levels against myriad country-level indicators (see above), proponents of instrumental rationality outline a mechanism (boundedly rational calculation) that produces corrupt acts before they add up to a national CPI score. Structural factors are seen as causal to the extent to which they change the parameters of cost-benefit calculations. In line with Klitgaard’s (1988) famous M + D – A = C formula, monopoly and discretion yield corruption when accountability is absent. At the situational level, this allows for some degree of interaction between the individual and his or her direct environment in acknowledging that officials bring their preferences (often seen as fixed) into occupational settings, which in turn may offer diverse opportunities (Dimant & Schulte, 2016).

To contextualize this calculation, the decision-making model is typically complemented by the principal-agent ecology derived from economic theory (Vannucci, 2017). In her classic rational-choice account of corrupt decision-making, Rose-Ackerman (1978) has portrayed corruption as a violation of a relation of trust between principal and agent. The official (agent) acts on behalf of an authority (principal), which they represent before clients. Whenever the benevolent principal fails to exercise control over the malevolent agent, the agent may (and will) act in self-interest and accept bribes from a third party (Aidt, 2003). This perspective aligns with criminological opportunity theories which rely on an RCP mechanism (Cohen & Felson, 1979; Hollis et al., 2013). For instance, Routine Activities Theory proposes that crime results when a motivated offender encounters a suitable target and there is no capable guardian present. The agent represents the motivated and self-interested offender, the principal embodies the present or absent capable guardian and the client a suitable target. This model, unfortunately, has all the shortcomings of ‘criminology without people’2 (Wikström, 2022, p. 179): the principal-agent model does not significantly acknowledge individual differences or the role of contextual factors beyond costs and benefits. In so doing it opens up more questions than it answers: why should we assume that the agent is motivated? And will the trio really act the same regardless of context?

Moreover, what to make of corrupt acts committed for the sake of the principal? Pohlmann and collaborators (2016) present a long list of cases where officials acted corruptly to further organizational interests with no personal reward, and often to their own detriment. Seldom were they lavishly rewarded by their principals or even expected to be, contrary to what rational choice theorists would predict. If self-interest was indeed the principle driving force behind corruption, organisational deviance would not be expected to reach the rate that it has in many bureaucracies. Similarly, the question arises as to why some officials abstain from corruption when opportunities abound. Klitgaard (1997, p. 4) rebuffs these concerns:

True, there are saints who resist all temptations and honest officials who resist most. But when bribes are large, the chances of being caught small, and the penalties meagre, many officials will succumb.

But what, we may ask, sets apart the saints from the sinners? One answer is found in the research tradition of experimental bribery games wherein different individuals are subject to uniformly applied treatment (Abbink et al., 2002). Such experiments attempt to mimic real-life corruption and not only replicate its constituent features, but also eschew the issue of unobservability and keep the structural factors constant. Bribery games have repeatedly shown that even in identical incentive structures, young people socialized in high-corruption countries are more likely to act corruptly (Barr & Serra, 2009; Cameron et al., 2009; see also Fürstenberg et al., 2023). This effect dwindles as students spend more time in a low-corruption environment, leading researchers to conclude that individual corruption propensity is, for the most part, culturally conditioned, with students internalising relevant norms.

One approach to accounting for the role of culture in decision-making is to incorporate it into the rational-choice model as set preferences whose violation incurs quantifiable ‘moral costs’ (Dhillon & Nicolò, 2023). Anticipating the pangs of conscience, the agent might realise that his or her self-image as an honest official of the state represents a greater utility than the monetary value of the bribe. Self-image and conscience, we are told, originate from our successful socialisation. This somewhat deterministic culture-as-values tradition suggests that defining what people want is the ultimate role of culture in decision-making (Parsons, 1951/2013). This, however, does not do justice to culture’s full impact on human behaviour. Cultural factors not only guide our preferences, but also prescribe the acceptable means to certain ends and provide scripts of behaviour (Swidler, 1986). This suggests that the rational-choice theory of action is incomplete and psychologically unrealistic, a full appreciation of culture urges one to go beyond the classic cost-benefit calculus.

Another critique of RCP, which we have articulated elsewhere, is that its supposed mechanism lacks psychological realism (Treiber, 2017; Wikström & Treiber, 2015; Herrmann, 2024). Do people always weigh the pros and cons of action alternatives before acting? Rational choice theorists in economics, sociology and criminology often concede that many decisions are made intuitively and without much rational deliberation, and that individuals generally only make ‘boundedly’ rational decisions and are susceptible to biases and cognitive shortcuts (Jones, 1999; Akers, 2011). Some go even further to acknowledge that RCP, including its action generating mechanism (i.e., rational calculation), is best understood as a predictive tool for behaviour rather than a theory of how people make decisions (McCarthy, 2002; Cornish & Clarke, 2017). This latter concession firmly squares with the critique by cognitive scientists that RCP is a paramorphic or as-if model of decision making (e.g., Berg & Gigerenzer, 2010; Cokeley & Kelley, 2009). The premise of the model is not that people make decisions in a rationally deliberative way but that the outcomes of people’s decisions resemble the outcomes one would expect had the decision been made in a rationally deliberative manner (McCarthy, 2002). Given this, we conclude that rational choice approaches may serve to predict the likelihood of a specific behaviour but are unable to explain how it comes about at a cognitive level.

Cultures of Corruption?

Cultural approaches recognize that ethical objections to corruption are not merely a negative addendum to the instrumental calculation, but rather act as an internalized barrier to corrupt behaviour (Zaloznaya, 2014; Torsello, 2023). Rules of official integrity form through historical processes and slowly permeate across national and organizational cultures. Corruption-favouring norms are likewise culturally transmitted, and outlive the contexts that created them (Hauk & Saez-Marti, 2002; Fisman & Miguel, 2007). They can permeate specific agencies, or institutions more generally. Public servants can become corrupted through contact with organizations whose unwritten rules promote bribe-taking (De Graaf, 2007). What is considered corrupt by the actors is often seen to lie in the cultural realm.

Granovetter (2007, p. 154) has observed that corruption is ‘behaviourally identical’ with various other transactions, and asked how society has constructed the difference between them. Many officials would decline informal payments if they recognised them as bribes rather than merited gifts earned by otherwise underpaid public servants. To study the meaning that a payment has for the actors necessitates going beyond the economic frame of reference imposed by the mainstream rational-choice model. Individual utility notwithstanding, officials always operate in a given moral climate. They will accept and demand payments they consider legitimate and the sources of that legitimacy are subject to a sociological, not economic analysis.

In the quest for an individual action mechanism, the cultural approach bids farewell to instrumental rationality and embraces new institutional theory, which portrays individuals as ‘deeply embedded in a world of symbols, scripts and routines (...) out of which a course of action is constructed’ (Hall & Taylor 1996, p. 939). In other words, even seemingly goal-oriented actions are bounded within culturally-defined frames of meaning (Campbell, 1998). Corruption is seen as a cultural practice which establishes itself as an intersubjectively comprehensible and habituated solution to individual/collective problems (Berger & Luckmann 1966). Once established, the ‘institutionalised’ solutions act as a factual reality vis-à-vis the individual and, as points of orientation, structure their decision-making process. Therefore, the individual decision to engage in bribery depends on available templates that ‘specify what one can see oneself doing in a given context’ (Hall & Taylor, 1996, p. 948). These templates, in turn, are absorbed through socialisation within national and organisational cultures (primary and secondary socialisation, respectively).

Imagine a recent graduate from a state university hired as a case administrator at a local branch of government. Growing up in a community accustomed to paying bribes to make do in the harsh realities of economic transition, she hardly ever heard the word ‘corruption’ but learned that most people ‘spoke to the hand’ when they had to ‘arrange things’. At her university, a ‘little persuader’ would likely improve grades or secure a mould-free dormitory room. New colleagues need not explain ‘how things are done here’: the unwritten rules could not be more clear. When a petitioner approaches her with a ‘backhander’, it does not occur to her to decline the offer, or that it might be inappropriate. These considerations are simply not part of her cultural toolkit (Swidler 1986). She may even feel grateful. Sanctified by tradition (Ledeneva, 1998; Fürstenberg, 2020), the transaction feels natural and reduces uncertainty – both parties know what to expect and what is expected of them (Husted, 1999).

This explanation may initially seem more plausible than a rational-choice models populated by dispassionate calculators, but there are other problems associated with viewing corrupt behaviour as culturally determined. The above scenario might not only strike one as unduly pessimistic but also invites charges of essentialism – the view that people act as they act primarily because of who they are, i.e., their position in society (Sayer, 1997). Individuals are hardly given any agency and seen mostly as avatars of the ‘cultures of corruption’ endemic in venal organizations. They are passive recipients of corruption-promoting cultural norms, which ‘seep into people through their skin’ (Pinker, 2002 p. 60). We argue that this neglects the distinction between personal moral rules and the norms of the environment – if individuals simply adopt the norms from the environment, they should have the same norms as their environments and personal moral rules of people sharing a cultural environment should not vary. Further, we stress that by neglecting the sources of norms other than culture, little explanation is given as to why individual corruption engagement varies both within similar cultural environments and across people raised in the same culture. It is likewise hard to account for action that opposes the unwritten rules within the cultural framework, which is therefore unable to explain whistle-blowing, one of the most desirable outcomes of anti-corruption interventions. Yet some officials blow the whistle on bribery, even when this goes against organisational cultures and elicits ostracism or reprisals (Bouville, 2008). Mindful of all this, we turn to an approach which views people as sources of their actions.

Situational Approach

Arguably, the research into corruption can greatly benefit from viewing corruption as a moral transgression and an outcome of person-setting interactions rather than purely self-interested behaviour or a cultural artefact. This paper makes the case that this could be achieved by applying Situational Action Theory (SAT), which aims to explain various acts of rule-breaking ‘from shoplifting to major company fraud’ and to recentre norms in criminological theory (Wikström 2010, p. 217). It does so by specifying a micro-level mechanism (the perception-choice process described in this section), by differentiating proximal from distal causes (causes of the causes), and by focusing on person-setting interactions at the origin of behaviour. This section summarises the theory’s main tenets and explains its untapped potential for corruption research.3

Taking an integrative approach to crime causation, SAT traces the course of criminal behaviour to the interplay of personal and environmental factors. The causes of crime, corruption included, are situational – they neither reside solely in the individual nor in his or her immediate environment (Wikström & Treiber, 2015). The individual brings his or her desires and sensitivities into a setting, which in turn supplies potential opportunities and enticements (Figure 1). Action selection occurs through the perception-choice process; the person reacts to relevant opportunities or frictions, perceiving alternatives for responding to them depending on the interplay between his/her personal morality and the moral context (moral norms and their enforcement of the setting in which he/she finds him/herself (what is termed exposure) (Wikström, 2014). He/she then chooses from among the perceived alternatives the action he/she intends to execute. SAT recognizes that people make both deliberate, reasoned choices, choosing between multiple alternative, and more automatic choices, driven by perception of only one alternative, often that has become habituated. An official who has routinely accepted bribes in the past may not consider an alternative other than accepting the bribe. Alternatively, if the official does perceive other alternatives, he/she may deliberate about what action to pursue. SAT argues that this evaluative choice process aims to determine the preferred, morally acceptable alternative, given the circumstances. Such a dual process model of action choice has been described in various ways, including Kahneman’s (2011) systems 1 and 2, and is more consistent with neurocognitive processes implicated in action processes than traditional rational-choice models (Treiber, 2016).4 While the deliberative pathway of the perception-choice process is much more complex, its outcomes can also be predicted based on i) the strength of motivation, ii) content of norms and iii) efficacy of controls. These are the inputs we now turn to.

Figure 1: Causal factors leading to corruption

Source: Adapted from Wikström et al. 2024.

SAT features an open concept of motivation that encompasses more than mere profit optimisation to include other forces driving corrupt behaviour. In a recent volume, Wikström and colleagues (2024) acknowledge that individuals might be incentivised by the prospect of honouring a commitment as strongly as by the opportunity to satisfy a desire. Instrumental motives certainly drive many to corruption but this does not account for all corruption (see Instrumental rationality above). When interacting with others, individuals deviate from the guidance of strict cost-benefit calculation, and they often do so in order to take revenge or return a favour (Fehr & Gächter, 2000). Many dishonest dealings arise from prosocial motivations, which hardly square with the rational-choice framework (Dungan et al., 2017). Corruption scholars have observed that many officials honour the terms of corrupt exchange even if they could easily cash in the bribe and then refuse to grant an unfair advantage (e.g. Abbink et al., 2002). This happens even when the bribee is unlikely to deal with the briber in the future and preferential handling exposes the official to a greater risk of detection than merely accepting the payoff. Considering that bribery is an unenforceable deal, it is surprising how many reciprocate (Köbis et al., 2018). ‘Why not sack the money and cheat the briber?’ asks Lambsdorff (2012, p. 280). The obligation to respond in kind is apparently felt more strongly than the binding force of the law and thus pressures the official to honour the corrupt commitment. Determined to pay his debts (Bowles & Gintis, 2002), homo reciprocans5 fits into SAT’s concept of motivation at least as well as the profit-oriented homo oeconomicus epitomising the rational-choice account of human nature.

Like other analytic social sciences (e.g. Elster, 2011), SAT stands by a firm distinction between motivations and norms. Norms are not motivators but rather provide guidance on how to respond to motivations (Wikström et al., 2024). Although research into the impact of personal morality on corruption has been scattered across several schools of inquiry, the overwhelming body of evidence now points to a norm-based model of corrupt decision-making. Even though the labels used vary from ‘moral commitments’ and ‘negative definitions of corruption’ to ‘internal sanctions’ (Tanner et al., 2022; Tavits, 2010, Elis & Simpson, 1995), it has been shown again and again that people with negative moral attitudes to corruption are less likely to engage in it. This holds true not only for intention-measuring vignettes but also for bribery games with real money on the table. The normative context of the setting has also proved highly influential – officials who perceive their environment as corrupt take bribes more often (Tavits, 2010; Köbis et al., 2018). In fact, influential work on corruption by Köbis and colleagues (2018) acknowledges the importance of both one’s personal morality (injunctive personal norms) and the perceived moral context of the setting (descriptive norms). The advancement proposed by SAT is to elucidate the effects that different constellations of personal rules and norms of the setting have on behaviour. Let us now consider two such constellations; cases of congruent and incongruent rule-guidance.

Whenever both personal moral rules and enforced moral norms of the setting align in precluding or permitting rule-breaking, the individual will align their action with these rules. Automatic decision-making is the typical pathway in cases of such moral correspondence. Note that moral correspondence is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, corruption-disapproving officials are extremely unlikely to take bribes in an environment where corruption is not morally accepted. On the other hand, when officials find bribe-taking acceptable and this is supported by others, such as those who oversee their work, then bribery might easily become an alternative an individual does not feel conflicted about (cf Ashforth & Anand, 2003). In these two ideal-typical constellations, corruption or desistence can be explained by moral norms of the individual and setting, without recourse to the concepts of self-control or deterrent threat of sanctions (Figure 2). When internal and external moral guidance corresponds, there is nothing to control, and thus nothing to explain for control-based approaches, such as the principal-agent model.

These observations dovetail with a broader shift from the self-interested actor model to one driven by rules that cannot be reduced to interests (Elster, 1989; Bunge & Wallis, 2008). However, the ambitions of SAT go beyond simply adding morality to the ever-growing list of risk factors and corruption correlates. Where previous literature settles for comparing coefficient sizes, which turn out to be greater for moral rules relative to instrumental factors anyway (Graeff et al., 2014), the question of how moral rules moderate the effects of monetary incentives and deterrents is at least equally interesting. This becomes clear when individuals face conflicting rule-guidance from the setting and the self.

Such incongruities between personal and circumstantial sets of rules increase the relevance of controls (SAT’s principle of the conditional relevance of controls). People with high self-control abilities are likely to be able to follow their inner moral code even when tempted to do otherwise by external forces (Wikström & Svensson, 2010). Conversely, powerful deterrents embedded in the setting might exact compliance even from those with weak personal moral rules (Wikström et al., 2011). These are the two (ideal-typical) situational constellations which allow internal and external controls to play a causal role in the emergence of the corrupt act. Thus, an additive, linear prediction is replaced with a nuanced mechanism-based explanation of why corruption happens (Hardie, 2020). Note that the cultural approaches (correctly) highlight the importance of norms, but, if internalised moral rules clash with the norms of the setting, these cultural approaches cannot predict how such incongruency will be resolved. By specifying the causal roles of norms and controls, SAT overcomes the apparent incompatibility of norm-based and control-based explanations.

A further comment on the nature of morality and controls is in order. In SAT, morality refers to a person or settings’ attitude towards specific rules of conduct (Wikström et al., 2012). SAT does not qualify people’s moral character (or setting’s moral norms) in terms of good or bad, but rather focuses on its orientation toward a certain rule, and if this allows a certain action alternative to be considered acceptable. The term corruption-relevant morality can be used for specificity. It consists of personal moral rules and moral emotions. The former are personal rules about what is right or wrong to do in a particular circumstance (Wikström, 2010). The moral rules an individual subscribes to are underwritten by his or her moral emotions (Barton-Crosby, 2022; Trivedi-Bateman, 2021; Svensson et al. 2017). Having strong corruption-relevant morality means that officials may experience (anticipated and anticipatory) feelings of guilt when they picture themselves taking a bribe, or shame when they think about their families, friends and colleagues learning about such a transgression (Trivedi-Bateman et al., 2024). If these feelings are strong enough, they simply won’t imagine themselves taking bribes, and bribe-taking is thus filtered out as a viable action alternative. Strong anti-bribery moral norms of the setting may also make it impossible for a person to imagine accepting a bribe under the circumstances. This is why a central role of morality in SAT’s action model is as a moral filter.

Controls (self-control and deterrence) form the second line of defence. Deterrents influences the action choice of a reasoning actor through a threat of sanctions (Wikström 2007; Wikström et al., 2011). A large body of evidence shows that a threat of sanctions reduces corrupt behaviour both inside and outside the lab (e.g. Banuri & Eckel, 2015; Di Tella & Schargrodsky, 2003). However, these studies have ignored person-setting interactions, and we thus cannot know if this corruption-reducing effect is universal, or (as we rather expect) concentrated among those who consider corruption as an action alternative in the first place. Again, for controls to be relevant there must be something to control (Hirtenlehner & Reinecke 2018; Hirtenlehner & Hardie, 2016).

The situational process of exercising (internal) self-control is rooted in executive capabilities governed by the brain’s prefrontal cortex (Treiber, 2011, 2017a). People might have different moral rules regarding corruption, but they also differ in how easily they abandon these principles when lured by easy money or put under pressure from their superiors or a corrupt partner. Low self-control helps explain the non-adherence to one’s own moral rules, which is hard to account for within the cultural framework. It is also the reason why some officials take undue risks and accept bribes even when the ‘rational choice’ would be to play safe and decline the offer.6 Therefore, the inclusion of self-control seems to be a necessary part of any plausible mechanism of corrupt decision-making. Indeed, corruption scholars have listed self-control among the influences shaping corrupt behaviour (Köbis et al., 2016). Note, however, that (just like external controls) self-control makes little sense as a stand-alone causal factor. It would presuppose an opportunity to offend, a desire for the spoils, perception of corruption as an action alternative, and a deliberation about action choice – too many conditions to assign it universal causal efficacy. Therefore, SAT postulates conditional relevance of controls conversely to control theories, which place control or lack thereof at the centre of crime causation (Wikström et al., 2012; Figure 2). Some person-setting interactions render self-control relevant, others do not.

Figure 2: Conditional relevance of controls in corrupt decision-making

Source: Adapted from Wikström 2010.

We have thus far discussed the proximal causes of corruption as elements of the perception-choice process. Zooming out from the situational model to distal causes, one might ask how people develop their propensities for corruption and become exposed to settings that are conducive to corrupt action. This is addressed by SAT’s social model, as opposed to the situational model presented above (Treiber, 2017b). According to SAT, individual propensities are acquired through two psycho-ecological processes: moral education (through instruction, e.g., about the acceptability of bribe taking; observation of others’ behaviour regarding bribe taking; and experimentation in bribe taking situations) and cognitive nurturing (strengthening their ability to use self-control; Wikström, 2019a). They become exposed to corrupt environments through processes of self and social selection into particular behaviour settings (Wikström, 2019b).

Culture plays a role in the formation of personal morality and, as new institutionalists suggest (Hall & Taylor, 1996), can indirectly influence available action alternatives. Culture is a major source of values, which are more abstract moral units that undergird specific action-guiding rules of conduct (Barton-Crosby, 2022). However, SAT is free of cultural determinism, as it also names other sources of moral rules, including moral reasoning and experimentation (Wikström, 2019a). Culture contributes to the emergence and distribution of corruption-conducive settings rich in corrupt opportunities through its role in shaping person-environment interactions over time (Kammigan & Linssen, 2012). This is turn shapes the content of people’s moral education and exposure to opportunities for corruption.

We have thus far covered two types of person-setting interactions: moral correspondence and the conditional relevance of controls. To recapitulate, moral correspondence means that an alignment between the rule guidance from the self and the setting leads individuals to choose their actions automatically and renders controls irrelevant. Thus, when a person whose morality does not support corruption takes part in a setting that likewise does not support corruption, it is very unlikely corruption will occur; alternatively, when a person whose morality does support corruption takes part is a setting that encourages corruption, it is likely corruption will occur. When one’s personal moral rules do not align with the moral rules of the setting, controls become relevant in determining the outcome; this is referred to as the conditional relevance of controls. External control is exerted through deterrence, the successful enforcement of the setting’s moral norms through the external threat of negative consequences; thus a reasoning actor whose personal morality is open to corruption may abstain from breaking the rules of the setting regarding corruption due to the threat of consequences. Internal control is exerted through exercising self-control, through which an individual resists external pressure to act corruptly and uphold his or her personal moral rules. These are the person-setting interactions at the heart of SAT’s micro-level mechanism (perception-choice process). Having specified the action-generating process at the micro-level, it is time to examine the person-setting interactions as part of the bigger picture.

Thus corruption will occur in situations wherein corruption-prone individuals find themselves in corruption-conducive settings, both of which can be identified by corruption-relevant action rules and their level of enforcement. Thus, corruption is not caused by ‘bad apples’ – corrupt individuals who act corruptly regardless of the setting, or by ‘bad barrels’ – circumstances which cause all actors to behave corruptly. Both ‘bad apples’ and ‘bad barrels’ matter, but whether certain apples go bad depends on the apple and the barrel.

The causes of such fateful convergences7 are twofold (Wikström & Sampson, 2003); self-selection and social selection of corruption-prone individuals into corrupt settings, organisations, and units. Self-selection occurs when a person exerts agency to take part in a setting of their choice, for example, an official actively chooses an appointment because it offers opportunities for informal enrichment. Social selection occurs when social forces place people in corrupt settings, for example, when a public servant is assigned to a jurisdiction where corruption is virtually omnipresent. If public servants who have a propensity for corruption are selected into corruption-conducive environments, corruption will be likely.

Evidence exists for social selection into corrupt settings. Together with seminal ethnographies (e.g. Smith, 2010), survey findings from Global Corruption Barometer (Transparency International, 2017) show that moral actors in many parts of the world are exposed daily to corrupt structures. Public servants trained and appointed in Norway or New Zealand might never have their professional integrity put to the test but for those based in corrupt regimes moral quandaries are part of everyday practice. As regards self-selection, an interesting study has been conducted in Ukraine, where corruption in the public sector is considered endemic (ibidem). In line with the self-selection hypothesis, students who cheated in an experimental bribery game stated particular interest in future careers related to state administration and judiciary (Gans-Morse, 2022). If such processes could be prevented, the wrongdoers would be given far fewer opportunities to abuse office for private gain. Two countries with the same number of corruption-prone individuals and equally corruption-conducive bureaucratic settings could end up with very different corruption rates if one country successfully kept corruptible people away from its public sector, or at least from the parts of public sector that are particularly vulnerable to bureaucratic abuse (high exposure, e.g. public procurement).

Implications for Research

Although rational-choice theorists and culturally oriented authors have made considerable contributions to understanding why officials engage in corruption, the limits of either approach are evident. Multidisciplinary scholarship has inadvertently produced a field where ‘so many explanations are offered that it is difficult to classify them in a systematic manner’ and as a result, ‘corruption can be attributed to almost anything’ (Caiden, 2001, p. 21,26).8 As the preceding section shows, SAT provides a promising framework to unscramble our understanding of how corruption emerges, based on a psychologically plausible perception-choice model. An analytic distinction is made between direct (situational) causes, causes of the causes and mere correlates. Concepts unsuccessfully used to explain corruption in toto can be systematically integrated and assigned relevant roles linked to the interaction of individuals and environments. This would allow us to establish a stronger link between the disciplines typically concerned with interindividual differences in corruptibility and those more interested in studying the effects of corruptive inducements. SAT might also help makes sense of corruption at different levels of analysis, since in the words of an anonymous reviewer ‘SAT’s situational model facilitates cross-disciplinary connections, offering a framework to explore processes at sociocultural, psycho-behavioural, and neurocognitive levels’ (for a detailed discussion of SAT’s situational model and its application see Wikstrom and Kroneberg 2022). As presented above, the situational approach is compatible with numerous extant studies and offers concepts around which most facts known about corruption can be organised, without the inconsistencies produced by competing rational-choice and cultural approaches.

Methodological implications of the interactive approach that lies at the heart of situational action theory hold another promise for empirical research into corruption. Moving away from a probabilistic approach that makes do with correlates (or ‘risk factors’) found in aggregate data, analytic criminology endorses methods aimed at dissecting the interaction between people and their environments (Hardie, 2020; Wikström & Kroneberg, 2022). Examining an official’s acts of corruption might hint at his or her criminal propensity but does not really show how the corrupt acts came about. Personal attributes only unfold their efficacy in relation to settings and circumstances. If some personal features increase the risk of corruption in one context and render it less likely in another, this effect can only be discovered through situational analysis. If certain settings trigger corruption in some public servants but not in all, the aggregate crime numbers for an administrative unit, for example, might provide very little information about how corrupt practices there come about. Genuine insights into the aetiology of corrupt behaviour are not gained by counting the number of corrupt acts attributable to a person or located in a setting over a particular time period, but rather through a study of situations, where individuals are situated in real-world settings and settings are populated by flesh-and-blood people. The convergence of people and places thus constitutes a basic unit of analysis.

To date, one of the most suitable tools for situational analysis of corruption is found in the experimental research tradition. The incentive structures of bribery games can replicate real-life corruption and lend high external validity to laboratory-based studies (Serra & Wantchekon, 2012; Banerjee et al., 2023).9 Scenario-based factorial surveys, in turn, leverage randomisation to manipulate relevant features of the setting, such as their moral climate, opportunities of unethical enrichment, and gradable threat of deterring sanctions (Paternoster & Simpson, 1996; Fürstenberg et al., 2023). With an appropriately diverse sample, researchers can ensure a healthy amount of variation in crucial personal characteristics: moral rules and emotions, and abilities to exercise self-control. Indeed, Hardie (2020) directly identifies such experiments as methodologically appropriate within an SAT framework.

For a fuller understanding of its subject, however, experimental research into corruption must bridge its current divide between the study of settings (differential treatment) and the study of people (selected characteristics). Typically, the experiments conducted by economists show how participants respond to various corruption-inducing treatments. These “representative individuals” (Granovetter, 2007) are typically economics students and, at best, their gender and age are recorded for descriptive purposes. Meanwhile, a simplified uniform-treatment version of the same experiment may be implemented at the neighbouring psychology department or political science institute, where researchers correlate the bribe-taking intentions with a variety of more or less relevant variables, for example nostalgia (Li et al., 2023) and membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP; He & Jiang, 2020), characteristics obviously unrelated to bribe-taking in any causally meaningful way.

It is almost as if one has to choose between a diversified treatment of a uniform sample and a uniform treatment of a diverse sample. But this dichotomy is false, and people and settings can be studied in one go. As Wikström and colleagues observed in 2012:

We may not be able to measure perception and choice processes directly, but it is possible to devise an experiment whereby we introduce individuals who differ in their crime propensity to settings that differ in their criminogeneity and observe how they interact.

Equipped with a variety of experimental methods, students of corruption can discover the mechanisms that lead to corrupt behaviour when different people find themselves in varying settings. Rather than asking how corruptible nostalgic past-dwellers are compared with card-carrying CCP members, research could considerably progress through the examination of personal and environmental causes in relation to one another. To be sure, most experiments, even those with credible incentive structures, face questions of generalisability. While economic corruption games and criminological vignette studies have fared well in lab-field validations (Armantier & Boly 2012; 2013; Wikström et al. 2012, Pogarsky 2004), it would be useful to triangulate them with observational evidence (presented for instance by Trivedi-Bateman and colleagues [2024]). As methods used to study decision-making become more advanced and immersive (e.g., Herrmann, 2024), we might soon be able to study person-setting interactions with both greater accuracy and validity. We recommend that these interactions be tested in a variety of behavioural contexts, since corruption is a broad concept encompassing many kinds of action. It is of note that the recent review of SAT’s empirical basis – although largely positive – found less support for its perception-choice process when it was applied to behaviours accepted in large parts of society (Hardie & Rose, 2024). By applying SAT to types of corruption that many see as acceptable (e.g., informal payments to healthcare workers in Eastern Europe; see Stepurko et al., 2013), researchers could test the theory’s implications more comprehensively.

Conclusions

Our considerations have begun from listing three main exceptions we, as analytic social scientists, took to the way corruption is currently understood and researched. Most of the literature, we argue, 1) does not specify the micro-level mechanism behind why corrupt acts happen, 2) lacks distinction between distal and proximal causes of corruption, or between causes and correlates, and 3) ignores the interplay of person and setting characteristics, instead focusing on either ‘bad apples’ or (more often) ‘bad barrels’. Against this backdrop, this paper put forward SAT as an alternative theoretical framework. Within this framework, 1) we have argued that the perception-choice process is a psychologically accurate micro-level explanation of how corrupt action is generated, i.e. how officials choose to engage in corruption; 2) we named the inputs into the perception choice process (motivation, norms, and sometimes deterrents as well as self-control abilities) as proximal causes, and factors that shape these inputs (personal and environmental emergence, moral education, and cognitive nurturing, and selection) as distal causes; and, 3) since behaviour is always a function of the individual and the setting (Lewin, 1936), our explanation centres on person-setting interactions: moral correspondence, the conditional relevance of control, and the multiplicative effect of propensity × exposure.

Following a critique of the existing theoretical approaches to corruption, an overview of SAT shows that the framework encapsulates many familiar elements, which are integrated in a creatively analytic manner. As a result, it offers testable explanations of phenomena that are hard to account for in a rational-choice framework (corruption for sole organizational benefit, reciprocating the bribe when the briber has no way of exacting favourable treatment, huge and non-random inter-individual differences in single-treatment bribery experiments) as well as in the cultural approach (whistle-blowing in corrupt organisations, ‘bad apples’ in some of the cleanest bureaucracies). This is achieved by a causal architecture that specifies not only the roles of different factors but also the circumstances under which they may be activated. In what follows, we will illustrate how SAT can serve as a new organizing framework for the facts already known about corruption.

The situational and interactive framework presented above can serve to advance an analytic social science of corruption (Graeff, 2016), by bringing norms to the forefront of the research landscape where morality has thus far been demoted to mere ‘nuance and subtlety’ on the fringes of the dominant neoclassical paradigm (Rose-Ackerman, 1999, p. xi). Our goal was to expose the inadequacies of this traditional approaches. We have argued that corruption should not be seen as an inherent feature of individuals or environments. It is neither bound to occur whenever expedient, nor inevitable in the alleged ‘cultures of corruption.’ However, this does not imply that corrupt behaviour is equally likely to happen in all situations — it is not. Certain constellations of people and places are more likely than others to bring about corrupt acts. This is especially true in cases when the moral climate is permissive, the honest few lack the capacity to resist temptations and group pressure, and the enforcement of anticorruption rules is lax.

Acknowledgements

We gratefully thank Alexander Fürstenberg, Chuck Lanfear, Paolo Campana, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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