Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

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."

ekjhgkejhgk

Well obviously.

gmerc

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

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?

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!"

dotcoma

Corruption erodes social trust where social trust exists.

victorbjorklund

Of course. Because in a dictatorship your social trust is based only on other things than the govt while in a democracy your social trust is in the govt as well.

mothballed

Corruption makes things more democratic in an autocracy by providing a mechanism of soft power by people not directly in the autocratic office. Corruption makes things less democratic in a pure democracy by granting more soft power to some individuals' 1/N office ( N= population size).

dzink

You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is essential for business transactions and specifically for long term investments. You can’t 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).

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.

SanjayMehta

BS data is BS. On what basis have they classified each country as a democracy or an autocracy? Edit: this article is an example of a circular research. Create a narrative branding target entities - in this case countries - with a positive or negative characteristic. For some reason the Scandinavians revel in this. Another example of compromised organisations are the various US govt funded "think tanks" which publish annual reports which are then used to classify whoever they want with whatever they want. Which then the US regime uses as a pretext for unprovoked attacks. The West is an example of systemic corruption at the highest levels, surpassed only their citizens collective ignorance and hypocrisy.

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.

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

butILoveLife

Id be curious if people in a democracy would answer No to the question "Is it normal to look through your SO phone?" more than in autocracies. Western idealism has taught us perfection and that corruption/cheating/lying/fraud/etc... is not the standard.

Sparkyte

Coffee is a roasted bean with hot water taking its essence.

varispeed

Corruption is rife in the West. Wealth managers wine and dine with governments and essentially order policies that nobody voted for that continue to be developed regardless of which party won the elections. Same faces meet with new cohorts of politicians and continue to get their way whilst security services supposed to protect democracy hide their heads in the sand. See things like Digital ID, censorship, surveillance - nobody voted for this, but certain wealth managers want this to happen and so it takes priority over issues that actually people would want to be resolved (housing, healthcare to name a few).

fedeb95

and this is a good thing.

tmilard

I wonder more : in wich side is considered today USA ?

pikachu0625

Everyone works for their community, and rewarding those who contribute the most by consensus is trust, regardless of gender, race, skill, or inheritance. The opposite is corruption.

Stranger43

And completely understandable once you understand the narratives of both system. An autocrat is supposed to be "Powerful" beyond all else and typically aren't required to be accountable to anyone so as long as the narrative of "Powerfully competent" holds corruption is merely an part of the narrative. In democracies the leadership is very much meant to be by and off the people and held accountable under the same legal standard they enforce on everyone else, and when that leadership start to act with the impunity of an "entrenched" aristocracy and stop following the rules the narrative breaks. And lets not forget that the original feudal aristocracy held their position almost entirely by the mechanism of unchallengeable property rights in an zero sum economy* and we begin to understand why the accumulation of property/wealth into fewer and fewer hands is a almost unmanageable threat to the narratives of western democracy. *We are returning to an zero sum economy as the planet have essentially run out of unowned/unused resources and that means that modern western economic solutions(grow grow grow) is simply not available anymore.