Economics

The importance of legal enforcement versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is very less understood. As a means of untangling these factors, Fisman and Miguel performed a natural experiment using the stationing of thousands of diplomats in New York City.  Diplomatic immunity for the diplomats means there is zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations. Use of this setting has allowed Fisman and Miguel to examine the role of cultural norms alone in corruption (Newsmax). This setting essentially strips out enforcement effects which in turn allowed interpretation of the diplomats behavior as reflection of their underlying propensity to break rules when enforcement is not a consideration (Fisman and Miguel 2). This research approach allowed for the construction of a revealed reference measure of corruption for government officials across 146 countries. As opposed to the existing country corruption indices that are typically based on subjective surveys, this is an objective measure, based on real rule-breaking in parking and is arguably an improvement over the subjective surveys. The parking violations measure has a much more precise definition and explicitly cardinal interpretation (Fisman and Miguel 4). Empirically, Fisman and Miguel found out that parking violation corruption measure is strongly positively correlated with other country corruption measures. The raw correlation between the country corruption rankings and pre-enforcement parking violations per diplomat is 0.18, and the between the corruption ranking and post-enforcement violations per capita is 0.24 (Fisman and Miguel 35). The worst parking violators (in order) are Kuwait, Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, Mozambique, Albania all rank poorly in cross-country corruption rankings (Fisman and Miguel 9).

On the other hand diplomats from low corruption countries (e.g., Norway) behave well even in situations where they can get away with violations. This suggests that the diplomats bring the social norms or corruption culture of their home country with them to New York City. The parking violation dataset also provides an insight into the related issues of sentiment and affinity in individual decision-making. The study found that diplomats from countries where popular attitudes towards the United States tend to be unfavorable have significantly more parking violations than those from countries where attitudes towards the United States are positive. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that factors other than legal enforcement (such as cultural norms and emotions) play significant role government officials corruption decisions. They suggest that understanding these factors should be taken seriously in debates about the causes of corruption and the policy measures to combat it. However, this study does not negate the importance of law enforcement measures. A crucial change in enforcement took place in October 2002, with implementation of the Clinton-Schumer Amendment to deal with the diplomat parking problem. This law gave the City permission to tow diplomatic vehicles, revoke U.N. parking permits, and have 110 of the total amount due deducted from U.S. government aid to the offending diplomats countries of origin. Parking violations fell substantially after this reform (Fisman and Miguel 8).

However, the focus of this study has been the pre-reform period from 1997-2002 using which Miguel and Fisman have illustrated that these diplomats bring the social norms or corruption culture of their home country with them to New York City. As an extension of this, it can be further argued that given the low levels of transparency and accountability in high corruption countries the government officials, including diplomats can break laws in their home country. It may be argued that much like the government officials, the average citizens too are influenced by the socio-cultural norms of their country. However, even though the diplomats and the average citizens have the similar norms, it may be argued that they still may display a different behaviour (given that average citizens, lacking diplomatic immunity have an increased susceptibility to falling under the purview of law enforcement).