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Article overview
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Corruption Drives the Emergence of Civil Society | Sherief Abdallah
; Rasha Sayed
; Iyad Rahwan
; Brad LeVeck
; Manuel Cebrian
; Alex Rutherford
; | Date: |
25 Jul 2013 | Abstract: | Peer punishment of free-riders (defectors) is a key mechanism for promoting
cooperation in society. However, it is highly unstable, due to its
susceptibility to second-order free-riding, in which some cooperators
contribute to a common project, but fail to punish defectors. This problem can
be eliminated with centralized sanctioning institutions (e.g. tax-funded police
force, criminal courts), which can maintain stable cooperation by punishing
both types of free-riders. Such institutions have been shown to emerge
naturally through social learning, and completely displace all other forms of
punishment. This,however, raises a puzzle: Why do many highly centralized
authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation, while states with
high levels of contributed public goods have higher tolerance for
citizen-driven peer punishment? Here we show that while increasing the power of
state-sanctioned punishment increases stability, this stability disappears when
institutional corruption allows people to avoid centralized punishment.
Counter-intuitively, increasing the sanctioning power of the central
institution makes things even worse, since this prevents peer punishers from
taking a role in maintaining cooperation. We show that a more lenient
institutional punishment can maintain cooperation because it allows peer
punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Similarly, we
show that severe centralized punishment is most beneficial when certain acts of
peer punishment are allowed. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for
why public goods provision and cooperation rarely flourishes in polities with
strong centralized punishment alone. Instead, cooperation rests on an authority
that protects a fundamental aspect of civil society, citizen participation in
policing the commons. | Source: | arXiv, 1307.6646 | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites |
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