Caryn Peiffer

University of Bristol | UB · School for Policy Studies

Corruption is a “social bad” regularly linked to lower quality public services and falling public trust in government. It is, therefore, critical to tackle corruption to avoid democratic decay and a disenchanted citizenry. One strategy that has been used to do this is to try to shift public attitudes toward corruption through public awareness-raisi...

This guide is written for civil society groups, anti-corruption institutions, campaigners, practitioners, and donors. It draws on all of the key research that has been published to date to help them answer the following questions: Is a messaging campaign the best option for your project/strategy? What kind of messaging campaign would be most likel...

Counter-serious and organised crime (SOC) strategies often include an awareness-raising element. Such messaging aims to build support for counter-SOC efforts, and intolerance for organised criminal activity. However, a growing body of research suggests that raising awareness to ‘social bads’ like SOC may risk backfiring by encouraging pessimistic a...

Almost all anti-corruption drives contain an awareness raising element. However, recent research reveals that anti-corruption awareness raising messages can backfire by triggering a sense that corruption is too big of a problem to tackle, thus encouraging resignation rather than resistance. We advance this literature by exploring another potential...

When trying to understand more about the consequences and processes of public policy, the gaze is often concentrated on those closest in proximity to the work of lobbying for, designing, implementing and evaluating policy. However, we also stand to learn volumes about comparative public policy by focusing instead on how ordinary people are impacted...

Anticorruption awareness raising efforts are designed to encourage citizens to resist and report corruption but have been found to either not work or have unwanted effects—including increasing bribe payment. This article represents the first test of whether these efforts also undermine critical aspects of a society's social contract, namely, willin...

Motivation Anti‐corruption campaigns often include an awareness‐raising component that stress the consequences of corruption. Indeed, governments and international donors have spent millions on promoting the evils of corruption. Experience suggests, however, that messages that highlight the prevalence of corruption may backfire by adding to the bel...

Awareness-raising messages feature prominently in most anticorruption strategies. Yet, there has been limited systematic research into their efficacy. There is growing concern that anticorruption awareness-raising efforts may be backfiring; instead of encouraging citizens to resist corruption, they may be nudging them to “go with the corrupt grain....

The overall objective of the study is to generate empirical data on the cost and extent of corruption in the Education Sector Uganda that can be used for dialogue with stakeholders to inform anti-corruption policy formulation, strategies, and programs in the sector. The baseline study shall provide a basis to understand and measure if an enhanced f...

The overall objective of the study is to generate empirical data on the cost and extent of corruption in the Health Sector Uganda that can be used for dialogue with stakeholders to inform anti-corruption policy formulation, strategies, and programs in the sector. The baseline study shall provide a basis to understand and measure if an enhanced focu...

The paper argues that while anti-corruption and organised crime are distinct disciplines, they do share important similarities, as well as scars and failures that are worth reflecting upon. Despite these connections , research and policy on corruption and organised crime have evolved largely in parallel, with few attempts to look across these two d...

Motivation Bribery is common in Uganda’s health sector, where an estimated one in four Ugandans who engage with the sector are asked to pay a bribe for services. Health workers in the public sector are badly paid, while significant numbers of well‐trained health workers emigrate to find better‐paid work. Tackling bribery in health services is impor...

Corruption has long been recognised as a significant challenge to sustainable development, both because it leads to the waste of public resources and because it can distort incentives for officials and citizens alike. The push to combat corruption has generally focused on either efforts to improve the enforcement of the rule of law by political lea...

The paper examines why there was a reduction of almost 15% in police bribery in Limpopo province, South Africa between 2011 and 2015, compared to only a 4% reduction the country overall. Drawing on statistical analysis and in-depth qualitative fieldwork, the research shows that the reduction occurred during an unprecedented anticorruption intervent...

Increasingly, development scholars and practitioners are reaching for exceptional examples of positive change to better understand how developmental progress occurs. These positive outlying cases are often referred to as ‘positive exceptions’, but also ‘positive deviants’ and ‘pockets of effectiveness’. Studies in this literature promise to identif...

The authors Richard Rose and Caryn Peiffer discuss the meaning and standards of corruption by looking at countries in the Global North and Global South in their contribution entitled Understanding Corruption in Different Contexts. They refer to fuzzy and broad definitions of corruption in circulation worldwide and emphasize the demand for an integr...

At the symbolic level, few citizens would say that they are against good governance and fewer still would endorse bad governance or corruption. However, because of their symbolic power, the terms governance and corruption are applied indiscriminately to describe what people like or dislike. Without standards for defining these terms, the result is...

Corruption studies evaluate behaviour by a combination of legal and normative standards. The two are mutually re-enforcing; when a public official takes a bribe, it is both illegal and wrong to do so. When social scientists write about political behaviour it is characterized in ethically neutral terms; for example, it is assumed that winning an ele...

The best-known measures of political corruption are in the style of macroeconomic statistics: they are indexes that characterize national governments as a whole. The primary concern is the extent to which high-ranking policymakers in the national capital make decisions that produce big-bucks benefits for a small number of people. The primary inform...

Although corruption is a problem of governance, development economists have been the leaders in research on the impact of corruption, because it is seen as having a substantial negative effect on economic growth. Corrupt politicians who control national resources and foreign aid may abuse their political power to make sure that they take what they...

Transparency is intended to open up the process of governance to public scrutiny and accountability. It replaces the historical practice of political elites conducting public affairs in private. Doing so restricts information about what happens within the black box of government to a limited number of insiders.

Explanations of corruption are methodologically determined. Studies at the national levels usually concentrate on capital-intensive corruption, but understanding the experience of individuals at the grass roots requires a different approach.

Politicians made exuberant by winning control of government with a promise to get rid of corruption are tempted to believe that their victory removes all the obstacles that are a legacy from their predecessors. Thus, when the Berlin Wall fell, well-intentioned theorists of the end of history saw no need to worry about corruption because democratic...

This chapter shifts attention from corruption at the top of government to corruption at the grass roots, where the great mass of citizens deal with public employees face-to-face. Whereas laws and rules are enacted in the national capital, this is a long way from where most people live, including the public employees nominally acting as their agents...

In the ideal-type bureaucratic state governance operates by the book. Statute books contain laws stating the conditions for supplying a specific service and public agencies have teachers, nurses or civil engineers with the expert knowledge and skills to deliver it by the book. But what do people do when the state in which they live is not staffed b...

This book explains why the role of corruption varies greatly between public services, between people, between national systems of governance, and between measures of corruption. More than 1.8 billion people pay the price of bad government each year, by sending a bribe to a public official. In developing countries, corruption affects social services...

This case study is part of a research project that used a novel mixed-methods approach to identify potentially unrecognised instances of development progress – specifically, of bribery reduction. Analysis of Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer flagged Uganda’s health sector as a potential 'positive outlier' because its bribery...

This case study examines police-related bribery in Limpopo province, South Africa. It asks why such bribery reduced by almost 15% between 2011 and 2015, while the rate in the rest of the country reduced by on average less than 4%. This bribery reduction in Limpopo's police took place during the time that the national government led an unprecedent...

Message Received? Experimental Findings on How Messages about Corruption Shape Perceptions - Caryn Peiffer

Increasingly, development scholars and practitioners are reaching for exceptional examples of positive change to better understand how developmental progress occurs. These are often referred to as ‘positive outliers’, but also ‘positive deviants’ and ‘pockets of effectiveness’. Studies in this literature promise to identify and examine positive de...

A growing body of research argues that anticorruption efforts fail because of a flawed theoretical foundation, where collective action theory is said to be a better lens for understanding corruption than the dominant principal–agent theory. We unpack this critique and advance several new arguments. First, the application of collective action theory...

Educated citizens are often considered more likely to report corruption; this belief shapes anti-corruption campaigns. However, we know little about how other factors may interact with education’s impact on willingness to report corruption. This article examines data from a household survey undertaken in Papua New Guinea. We find considerable suppo...

Humanitarian aid can be contentious. Should finite national resources be sacrificed to serve the needy abroad? Social identity theorists argue that identification with a superordinate group, in this case the larger world community, should increase individual support for policies such as international humanitarian assistance. However, individuals ca...

Whereas most studies find the poor in Africa to be more vulnerable to bribery because of their lower socio-economic status, this paper proposes institutional differences as an alternative explanation. Because poor people are unable to afford privately provided services, they must use public services. In relying on the state more often, the poor bec...

Bribery involves individuals exchanging material benefits for a service of a public institution. To understand the process of bribery we need to integrate measures of individual behaviour and institutional attributes rather than rely exclusively on surveys of individual perceptions and experience or macro-level corruption indexes of national instit...

Many anticorruption campaigns aim to encourage citizens to demand better control over corruption. Recent literature suggests that perceived high levels of corruption and government effectiveness in controlling corruption will limit citizens' willingness to actively oppose corruption. Using Transparency International's 2013 Global Corruption Baromet...

Economists are generally in agreement that economic integration is mostly beneficial to society at large, even though such projects produce both winners and losers.1 At times, publics have rejected integration altogether, for instance, in the 1992 majority vote in Switzerland to not join the European Economic Area. At other times, the public has re...

Bribery matters because each year it affects more than 1.6 billion people around the world. Bribes are paid to public officials in order to get health care, education and other public services to which they are entitled or to escape obligation. Such violation of bureaucratic standards is different in kind and impact from other types of corruption,...

Governance is about how public officials deliver services that affect the everyday lives of ordinary people. In the best governed societies, education, health care, policing, the courts and permits are delivered by the book, that is, in keeping with bureaucratic rules. But in many countries some officials do not always follow these rules. Informal...

Change is the policy goal in countries in which bribery is relatively frequent. However, comparing the results of Barometer surveys for periods up to a decade shows a high degree of stability in the extent of bribery. An average of about one-quarter pay bribes in Africa, Latin America, Asia and post-Communist countries each year. Europe is deviant...

Because surveys focus on individual experience, they reveal differences within countries that are obscured by national indexes of corruption. Every survey finds that among people having contact with public services, most receive them without paying a bribe. The incidence of bribery varies among services. Bribery is highest for health care, because...

Principles applicable to reducing capital-intensive bribery in national capitals have little relevance for grass-roots bribery. What is required there is a reduction in personal contact between public officials and people seeking services and openness in the allocation of social benefits. Applicable principles include computerization; allocating se...

Before a survey begins, the organizers must ask themselves questions and make choices about the countries to be covered; the topics to be included; the amount of time available for questions about corruption in competition with other topics; key concepts for analysis; and the wording of specific questions. Constraints are imposed by the characteris...

Contact is a pre-condition of putting a bribe in the hands of a public official. Global surveys find that people in lower as well as higher income countries usually contact two or three public services each year. This is done to meet needs for health care or education or obligations imposed by government regulations, the courts or police, or for bo...

The social psychological maxim — things are real if people see them as real — makes popular perceptions of corruption a relevant feature of surveys. However, the subjective psychological basis of perceptions means that they should not be confused with behaviour. Perceptions of corruption are everywhere higher than the experience of paying a bribe i...

Generalizations about African societies being pervasively corrupt are refuted in this innovative paper. Among 25,397 Afrobarometer respondents in 18 countries, 26% report paying a bribe, while 74% do not. Five hypotheses offer explanations: institutional context, inequalities of socio-economic resources, social inclusion and exclusion, social and p...

In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat under...

Scholars and policy makers alike argue that leaders of democracies should find it in their interest to provide high levels of social services due to a fear of being voted out of office. Yet, I find that Africa's newer democracies provide levels of social services strikingly similar to what the continent's existing non-democracies supply. This disse...

Over the last 10 years foreign aid for HIV/AIDS control has grown from ‘millions to billions’. This study investigates donor motivations in the targeting of bilateral HIV/AIDS assistance. Are donors selecting recipients primarily based on level of need or are political and merit-based considerations at play as well? The results of our two-stage sta...

The majority of studies investigating the determinants of public support for international economic and political integration have primarily focused on citizen attitudes in European Union member-states and candidate countries. This body of research has found, by and large, that the intensity of an individual’s sense of national and supranational id...

The few studies that have examined the systematic determinants of HIV/AIDS policy cross-nationally have left the possible impact of foreign aid out of the equation. At a time when developed nations are critically reassessing their foreign aid commitments a deeper understanding of the impact of HIV/AIDS foreign aid on policy outcomes in the developi...

In this paper, we try to explain variations in African democratization trajectories by looking at the determinants of changes in civil liberties and human rights between the five-year period preceding 1990 and the five-year period ending in 2008. We find that the civil liberties and human rights performances of African governments respond to differ...

This paper reviews concepts essential to understand the experience of mass bribery; compares alternative questions used by major multi-national surveys to measure that experience; and reports data from 248 surveys in 125 countries with 285,678 interviews. The major multi-national surveys included are the Global Corruption Barometer of Transparency...