2.7 · Can a country change? Somebody already checked

BeginnerDuration ~12 min readTools One Filipino behaviour that annoys you

The big idea: somebody already ran the experiment on whether a population’s behaviour is fixed, several times, and the finding is that culture sets the starting point while the rules set the result.

The analogy

Every production has a petty cash float.

Version one: an envelope in a drawer. Everyone means to write things down. Nobody quite does, the receipts are in three jackets and a car, and at wrap the envelope is short. Not because the crew are thieves. Because the drawer has no memory and there is nothing at the end of the week that has to balance.

Version two: same envelope, same crew, same shoot. Now a receipt goes in for every peso out, and the float gets read back at wrap. It balances. Nobody was replaced, nobody was lectured, nobody had a change of heart about money.

The interesting part is what a producer concludes from this. Not that the crew were secretly honest all along, and not that they were secretly dishonest. Only that the drawer was the problem and the drawer was the thing that could be changed.

Everything in this lesson is a version of somebody swapping the drawer.

How it works

Start with the cleanest test anyone has run on this question.

Thousands of United Nations diplomats live and work in the same few blocks of Manhattan. For years they carried diplomatic immunity, which meant parking tickets had no consequence whatsoever. No towing, no penalty, nothing collectable. Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel realised what that was: a natural experiment in behaviour with the enforcement removed. Whatever those diplomats did with a fire hydrant was a measure of what they brought with them.

What they found is the part you have to say first, out loud, without softening it. Diplomats from countries that score badly on corruption measures racked up far more unpaid violations than diplomats from countries that score well. Same city, same streets, same absence of penalty. The norm travelled with the person, thousands of miles from home. The working paper is titled “Cultures of Corruption,” and the course concedes that title in full.

Then New York changed the drawer. In 2002 the city obtained the power to tow diplomatic vehicles, revoke their United Nations parking permits, and have the money owed deducted from American aid to the offending country. Violations fell sharply. Same diplomats. Same countries. Same norms, since nobody’s upbringing changed in a fiscal quarter. That is the enforcement effect, and it is the whole argument in one dataset: culture set the baseline, and the rules set the outcome.

Two details worth carrying. Filipino diplomats sat around the middle of that table, closer to Spain and Ukraine than to either end of it, which is a less satisfying fact than the story usually told about Filipinos and rules. And the widely quoted figure for how far violations fell is not in the paper the course has read, so this lesson gives the direction and not the magnitude.

Now the same move at national scale, twice.

Hong Kong in the sixties ran on payments. Cash for a hospital bed, cash for a licence, and a nickname for the practice. In 1974 the Independent Commission Against Corruption was established with three jobs, enforcement, prevention and education, and one structural feature that mattered more than any of them: it was independent of both the government and the police. Hong Kong afterwards became one of the cleanest jurisdictions measured. Nobody argues that Hong Kong had a change of heart. An institution was built and given teeth, and the change was fought, not welcomed. Serving and retired police officers stormed the commission’s headquarters a few years in.

Georgia did the blunt version. In 2004 the traffic police were disbanded outright, roughly sixteen thousand officers dismissed at once, and a much smaller new force stood up the following month on new pay and new recruitment. It held. Nobody claims Georgians became different people between one summer and the next.

Then the case that is closest to home, and the one that answers “we just need good leaders.” Jesse Robredo ran Naga City. What he is remembered for personally is being incorruptible, and that part does not transfer, because you cannot install it anywhere. What transfers is what he actually built. The city council passed an Empowerment Ordinance creating a People’s Council, which wrote the participation of NGOs and community organisations into the city’s own deliberations. He did not ask to be trusted. He put citizen participation into the rules so it would outlast him, which is the only form of good intention that survives an election.

And one test run on Filipino behaviour directly, on the behaviour this level spent a lesson explaining. In Sorsogon City, researchers invited voters to make a promise not to sell their vote. Most accepted, and vote-selling went down, with the effect strongest where the payments on offer were smallest. A second version, inviting people to take the money and then vote their conscience, did not work nearly as well. That promise is a commitment device, meaning a constraint a person accepts now because they know what they will be tempted to do later. Strangers with clipboards moved a behaviour that gets described as a cultural trait. That does not make it a small trait. It makes it a trait with a lever attached.

Now the counterweights, because a level does not get to close on the good half.

Institutional persistence is real and measured. Becker and colleagues compared communities on either side of the long-dissolved Habsburg border, sharing identical formal institutions for a century, and found that historical Habsburg affiliation still predicts higher trust in courts and police and lower bureaucratic corruption today. Today’s culture is frequently yesterday’s administration, still running. Whatever gets built in the Philippines is working against a headwind installed by the office you met in Lesson 1.2. And the dynastic share is rising, not falling.

So the honest sentence is not that things will get better. Alesina and Giuliano make the narrower one: culture and institutions cause each other, which means culture was never the immovable term in the equation.

This level was built to return respect to the people, including you, and whether it did that is not something a lesson gets to decide. What is on the table is smaller and it is sourced. The mechanism by which a population’s behaviour changes is known. It has been operated by ordinary administrators in worse conditions than these. And not one of those cases required a new kind of person.

The pattern

Behaviour follows the arrangement, and the arrangement is the part somebody can actually change. Norms set the baseline. Enforcement, or its absence, sets the result. Both are real, and they are two different levers. When someone says the culture would have to change first, ask which rule changed in Manhattan, in Hong Kong, in Georgia, in Naga, and who had to become a different person. Nobody did. The headwind is real too. Administrative culture can outlive its administration by a century, which makes it dated rather than eternal, and dated things can be fought.

The receipts (evidence, if you want it)

• This lesson is explainer-led and has no video. Every case below is a paper or an official history, and the strongest of them is free.
• The parking study, read from the source. Raymond Fisman and Edward Miguel, “Corruption, Norms, and Legal Enforcement: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets,” Journal of Political Economy, 115(6), 2007, 1020 to 1048, paid. The free earlier version, “Cultures of Corruption: Evidence From Diplomatic Parking Tickets,” NBER Working Paper 12312, June 2006, is at https://www.nber.org/papers/w12312 and is the copy this course read from directly. Design: unpaid New York City parking violations by diplomats from 146 countries, over 1,700 mission staff at any time, pre-enforcement window 24 November 1997 to 31 October 2002.
• The enforcement change, exactly. The Clinton-Schumer Amendment, implemented October 2002, gave New York City permission to tow diplomatic vehicles, revoke their UN parking permits, and have 110 percent of the total amount due deducted from United States aid to the offending diplomats’ countries of origin. The paper’s own words: “Parking violations fell substantially after this reform, suggesting that increased enforcement can sharply reduce corruption, but the basic cross-country patterns remain unchanged.”
• Disputed, and handled as disputed. The often-quoted claim that violations fell by roughly 98 percent does not appear in the working paper read for this course, which says only that they fell “substantially” and “dramatically.” The direction is solid and the magnitude is not sourced here. State the direction, or pull the exact figure from the Journal of Political Economy version before it goes on screen.
• Where the Philippines actually sits in that table. Average unpaid annual violations per diplomat, November 1997 to November 2002: Philippines 11.5, ranked 53rd of 146, between Spain at 12.7 and Ghana at 11.3. Top of the table: Kuwait 246.2, Egypt 139.6, Chad 124.3. At zero: the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Turkey and others. Table 1, NBER WP 12312.
• Independently replicated. R. Albergaria (2017), Journal of Applied Econometrics, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jae.2540 .
• Hong Kong. The Independent Commission Against Corruption was established in February 1974 with a three-part mandate of enforcement, prevention and education, structurally independent of both government and police. In October 1977 serving and retired police officers stormed ICAC headquarters, which is why the course describes the transition as contested. Official history, free: https://www.icac.org.hk/en/about/history/index.html . Long read: South China Morning Post, “The ICAC: how Hong Kong’s corrupt police force became ‘Asia’s finest’,” https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3035736/icac-how-hong-kongs-corrupt-police-force-became . Academic overview, free PDF: “Combating Corruption: the Hong Kong Experience,” Tsinghua China Law Review, https://www.tsinghuachinalawreview.law.tsinghua.edu.cn/UploadFiles/2022-11-17/dv6gyayaqfc6mhfg.pdf .
• Georgia. In July 2004 the traffic police (GAI) were disbanded outright, about 16,000 officers dismissed, and in August a new 2,400-strong Patrol Police was rolled out with higher salaries, new recruitment, new equipment and a new code of ethics. Across the wider reform roughly 30,000 police were dismissed. Princeton Innovations for Successful Societies, “Rebuilding Georgia’s Police, 2004-2006,” free PDF: https://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf5601/files/Policy_Note_ID126.pdf . World Bank, Fighting Corruption in Public Services: Chronicling Georgia’s Reforms, 2012, free PDF: https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/518301468256183463/pdf/664490PUB0EPI0065774B09780821394755.pdf . Also Centre for Public Impact and Engvall (2012), Silk Road Paper. Unverified: specific before-and-after bribery percentages were not confirmed in this course’s pass. The World Bank volume is where to get them.
• Naga City. Jesse Robredo received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service in 2000, cited for “giving credence to the promise of democracy by demonstrating that effective city management is compatible with yielding power to the people,” https://rmaward.asia/rmawardees/robredo-jesse-manalastas/ . The mechanism that transfers is the Empowerment Ordinance and the Naga City People’s Council, which institutionalised NGO and people’s organisation participation in city deliberations. Princeton ISS policy note, free PDF: https://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toruqf5601/files/Policy_Note_ID158.pdf . Robredo interview transcript, free: https://successfulsocieties.princeton.edu/interviews/jesse-robredo . Galing Pook: https://www.galingpook.org/what-we-do/awards/awardees/people-empowerment-program-of-naga-city/ . Independent academic treatment: “Describing Transformational Leadership Practices in Naga City,” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, free PDF: https://www.apu.ac.jp/rcaps/uploads/fckeditor/publications/journal/RJAPS_V28_Ana.pdf .
• Unverified, and therefore not in the lesson. The claim that Naga City’s local revenues rose by 573 percent comes from the Magsaysay citation and city materials, which are celebratory sources. Verify against Bureau of Local Government Finance records before use. The ordinance and the People’s Council are solid regardless, which is why the lesson rests on them and not on the number.
• The Philippine behaviour experiment. Allen Hicken, Stephen Leider, Nico Ravanilla and Dean Yang (2018), “Temptation in vote-selling: Evidence from a field experiment in the Philippines,” Journal of Development Economics, 131, 1 to 14. Free working paper: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/102099/1/cesifo_wp4828.pdf . Sorsogon City. Inviting voters to promise not to sell their vote was taken up by a majority, reduced vote-selling, and worked hardest in races with smaller payments. Inviting voters to take the money and vote their conscience was significantly less effective. Scope note: it reduced the behaviour, it did not abolish it.
• The counterweight, measured. Sascha O. Becker, Katrin Boeckh, Christa Hainz and Ludger Woessmann (2016), “The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy,” The Economic Journal, 126(590). Communities on both sides of the long-dissolved Habsburg border have shared identical formal institutions for a century, and historical Habsburg affiliation still predicts higher current trust in courts and police and lower bureaucratic corruption, surviving falsification tests with spuriously moved borders. Free working paper: https://conference.iza.org/DivLMI2010/becker_s506.pdf .
• The theory the course uses when someone says culture is destiny. Alberto Alesina and Paola Giuliano (2015), “Culture and Institutions,” Journal of Economic Literature, 53(4), 898 to 944. Free NBER version: https://www.nber.org/papers/w19750 . The paper’s stated purpose is assessing a two-way causal effect between culture and institutions.
• How cultures move when they move. Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, on World Values Survey waves showing shifts from traditional toward secular-rational values and from survival toward self-expression values across industrialising societies, arriving mostly through cohort replacement rather than through individuals changing their minds. Free PDF: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/InglehartWelzel2011.pdf . Worth knowing because it sets the honest timescale.
• The other counterweight, carried from Level 1. Fat dynasties rose from 19 percent to 29 percent of the total between 1988 and 2019, and the dynastic share of provincial governors, representatives and mayors is higher now than it was in 2004. Sources in Lesson 1.8.
• The standing limit on all of it. None of these cases says change in the Philippines is likely. They establish that it is possible and that the mechanism is known. The course does not upgrade that sentence anywhere later.

Your one move

Pick one Filipino behaviour that genuinely annoys you. Not a national abstraction. A specific thing you have watched happen: the queue that dissolves, the call time nobody keeps, the permit that needs a personal visit, the invoice that arrives with a favour attached.

Four lines on one page, in this order.

1. The behaviour, named honestly. No softening. If it costs you money or a day, say so.
2. What makes it the rational choice for the person doing it. Not their character. What they get, what they avoid, and what happens to the one person who does the opposite.
3. One rule that would change the arithmetic. A specific rule, in a specific office, with a specific consequence for ignoring it. Nothing about attitudes, nothing about awareness campaigns, nothing about education. A drawer swap.
4. Who would have to lose something for that rule to pass. Name the interest, not the villain.

Thirty minutes. Done when four lines exist and line three names an office rather than a value.

Want to go further?

Take line three and find out whether somebody already tried it. Naga City, the Sorsogon experiment and the ICAC’s prevention arm all published what they did, and all three are free at the links in the receipts.

Finding that your idea has already been run somewhere is the best possible outcome here, because then the question stops being whether it would work and becomes what it cost the people who did it.

The needle: an office paid by the people it governed is a rule, not a personality. Every case in this lesson is somebody rewriting a rule of that kind, and the reason none of them needed a new kind of citizen is that no rule of that kind was ever made of citizens.

The Level 2 capstone: the interview question bank

Eighteen questions you would ask on camera. Six for each of three kinds of subject.

1. A scholar. Someone who owns one of the concepts in this level.
2. A practitioner inside the system. A barangay official, a line producer, a civil servant, a permit clerk.
3. An ordinary person the system acts on. Somebody who has queued, paid, waited, or voted.

Every question carries two tags: the concept it is testing, and the source that concept came from.

Two hard rules. No question may contain the word “corrupt,” because it puts the subject on trial and ends the interview. And no question may be answerable with yes or no.

Not yet: fewer than eighteen questions, or questions that lead the witness, or any question that would make a subject feel accused.

Passing: eighteen questions across the three subject types, each tagged with its concept and its citation, each open-ended.

Strong: the above, plus three questions written specifically to draw out a story rather than an opinion, and at least two questions designed to give the subject a fair chance to disagree with this course’s own thesis.

The gate: hand someone the bank and have them run six questions at you, without you needing to explain a single term.

Interview question bank templateinterview-question-bank.pdf176 KBCourse original, formatted from this lesson's own sources

Terms introduced

Terms introduced in this lesson

• Enforcement effect
• Institutional persistence
• Commitment device
• People's Council / Empowerment Ordinance

Each term links to the glossary, where it is defined by the way you just used it.

Check

Check yourself

1. Fisman and Miguel studied UN diplomats parking illegally in Manhattan while immune from any penalty. What does the study concede to the culture argument, and how does it defeat it?

   It concedes the culture argument completely, since under zero enforcement diplomats behaved like their home countries. Then New York got the power to tow and revoke permits, and violations fell sharply among the same people. Norms set the baseline, enforcement set the outcomeIt denies that national norms exist, and shows that behaviour is set entirely by enforcementIt concedes nothing and defeats nothing, because parking is too small a behaviour to stand in for corruptionIt concedes that enforcement matters, and shows that norms matter more, since the differences between countries never disappeared

2. Why does the course reach for Hong Kong and Georgia rather than for a story about a country that grew more honest over time?

   Because in both cases a specific institution was built or rebuilt on a date, nobody claims the population underwent a change of values, and in both cases the transition was fought over rather than smoothBecause both are Asian cases and therefore closer to the Philippine situationBecause both transitions were peaceful, which is the outcome the Philippines needsBecause both had foreign advisers, which is the missing ingredient in Philippine reform

3. What is the part of Jesse Robredo's work in Naga City that actually transfers to somewhere else?

   The Empowerment Ordinance and the People's Council it created, which wrote citizen participation into the rules of city deliberation so it did not depend on who was mayorThe rise in local revenues, which proves that clean government pays for itselfHis personal integrity, which set a standard other officials could copyHis national profile, which protected the reforms from provincial interference

4. This lesson closes a level. What is it entitled to claim?

   That the mechanism of behaviour change is known and has been operated by ordinary people in worse conditions, while the counterweights stand: institutional culture can outlive its institution by a century, and the dynastic share is rising rather than fallingThat understanding the mechanism is itself the change, since behaviour follows beliefThat change is unlikely, since persistence beats reform in every case studiedThat the Philippines is on its way out of this, given the evidence assembled

Check answers

You can move on when you can… describe the diplomatic parking ticket experiment and say exactly what it concedes to the culture argument and exactly how it defeats it, and name one Philippine mechanism that changed behaviour without changing anyone’s values.

Mark this lesson complete

Go deeper

• Next up: Level 3 opens with 3.1 · The movies got here before we did, which takes everything from these two levels and points it at one industry, starting with who owned the screens before Filipinos owned a camera.
• Part five of the Culture research map holds every case in this lesson at full length, with the unverified figures marked, plus the theory section on why culture and institutions cause each other. It is the source document for the capstone.
• The Fisman and Miguel working paper is free at the link in the receipts and short enough for one sitting. Read Table 1 in particular. Seeing your own country’s row in a list of 146 is a different experience from being told about it.