“Panama Papers”, then “Pandora Papers” denouncing large-scale tax evasion, use of public money for personal ends, fictitious jobs: revelations of corruption scandals targeting political figures abound in the media. Beyond the calls (often without response) to the reforms of the fiscal and financial systems and the political posturing invoking the “Exemplary Republic” or denouncing the “system corruption”, what is the impact of these scandals on the moral values and behavior of citizens themselves? How does the social contract resist in the face of these highlighting of privileges, privileges and appropriation of public goods by some of our representatives?
Answering this question is eminently difficult. First, we must be able to measure the response of citizens. Then we must ensure that a change in behavior is caused by these political-financial scandals rather than by other events occurring at the same time. For example, observing that tax evasion by taxpayers follows the same evolution as tax evasion by politicians does not establish any causal link: it may simply be due to the fact that law firms in tax havens become better at recruiting their customers…
A recent study, however, succeeds in establishing that political corruption does indeed undermine the social contract (“Contagious Dishonesty: Corruption Scandals and Supermarket Theft”, Giorgio Gulino and Federico Masera, Working Paper No. 1267, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, 2021). The authors observed thefts in a large Italian supermarket chain by having access to 260,000 customer checks.
Error or theft
To save the buyer time (and the supermarket personnel costs), he can scan his purchases himself with a portable scanner. Customers can make mistakes by scanning the wrong object; they can also steal, systematically scanning for cheaper products. Randomly, the supermarket carries out (rarely) checks. These checks reveal 6% of cases in which customers erred by scanning more than the value of their cart, and 14% of cases in which they scanned less than the value of their cart – the difference in proportion between those who are wrong one way or the other which can be attributed to theft behavior.
The authors then observed the behavior of customers when corruption scandals are revealed in the newspapers. By using only local scandals and comparing the behavior of customers from cities where a scandal broke with the behavior, on the same day and sometimes in the same supermarket, of customers from “scandal-free” cities, the authors show a significant increase in thefts correlated with the corruption scandal. They estimate that the probability of theft increases by 30% for at least four days after the revelation of the scandal. The more serious the case and the more importance local newspapers give to corruption cases (for example, on days when there is no football match), the more customers steal!
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