Alberto Simpser

Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes

Constitutions in authoritarian regimes are often denigrated as meaningless exercises in political theater. Yet the burgeoning literature on authoritarian regimes more broadly has produced a wealth of insights into particular institutions such as legislatures, courts and elections; into regime practices such as co-optation and repression; and into non-democratic sources of accountability. In this vein, this introduction to a new edited volume explores the form and function of constitutions in countries without the fully articulated institutions of limited government. The chapters in the book utilize a wide range of methods and focus on a broad set of cases, representing many different types of authoritarian regimes. The book offers an exploration into the constitutions of authoritarian regimes, generating broader insights into the study of constitutions and their functions more generally.

The Culture of Corruption across Generations: An Empirical Study of Bribery Attitudes and Behavior

Is culture a lasting driver of corruption? Recent scholarship suggests that any influence of culture on corruption is short-lived. I focus on one subcomponent of corruption-related culture -- normative attitudes towards bribery -- and study whether such attitudes persist through generational change. I compare individuals who share an institutional environment but whose parents were born abroad and find evidence of intergenerational persistence: average attitudes towards bribery in the parental country of ancestry explain variation in attitudes towards bribery across individuals in the study sample. The norms associated with the mothers ancestry matter more than those associated with the fathers, consistent with family-based mechanisms of attitudinal transmission. Relatedly, persistence is stronger for those second-generation immigrants who speak the language of their ancestors at home. I find no evidence that bribery attitudes are transmitted as part of a broader bundle of norms including generalized trust, or attitudes towards the law, as ancestral bribery attitudes do not predict any of a range of respondent norms, and individual bribery attitudes are not stably predicted by ancestral trust or ancestral attitudes towards the law. Finally, bribery attitudes are associated with a measure of bribing behavior. These results suggest that cultural factors deserve close attention in corruption scholarship and policy.

When Do Sensitive Survey Questions Elicit Truthful Answers? Theory and Evidence with Application to the RRT and the List Experiment

Corruption, vote buying, and other sensitive topics are difficult to study because people tend to under-report them in surveys. The degree of under-reporting bias has been shown to vary across studies, contexts, and question structures, but no systematic explanation for the variation has been advanced. I provide a simple theory that describes conditions under which an individual is more - or less - likely to respond truthfully to a sensitive question. The theory is based on the intuition that respondents lie to avoid looking bad in the eyes of interviewers. The main implication is that a respondents second-order beliefs about the interviewers priors are a key determinant of truthfulness. Empirical analysis of original data supports this claim: respondents second-order beliefs correlate strongly with self-reported nonvoting and cheating. I show how second-order beliefs can be used to adjust for under-reporting bias.