Enforcement effect

The share of behaviour that is set by what happens when a rule is broken, as distinct from the share set by what people believe about the rule. The two are separable, and the diplomatic parking study is the clearest place they have been separated, because the study had a period with no enforcement at all and then a period with real enforcement, holding the people constant.

The reason it matters to this course is what it does to the culture argument. It concedes it completely and then limits it. Norms are real, they travel with people across the world, and they predict behaviour when nobody is watching. They also stop being the deciding factor the moment a consequence exists. Culture sets the baseline, enforcement sets the outcome, and only one of those is something an administrator can write down on a Tuesday.

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; free earlier version “Cultures of Corruption: Evidence From Diplomatic Parking Tickets,” NBER Working Paper 12312, 2006, https://www.nber.org/papers/w12312 . Diplomats from 146 countries, unpaid New York City violations, zero enforcement before the Clinton-Schumer Amendment of October 2002 and real enforcement after it, with the paper reporting that violations “fell substantially” while the cross-country pattern held. The term as used here is the course’s shorthand for that contrast, not a phrase coined in the paper.

First used in: 2.7 · Can a country change? Somebody already checked