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28 March 2024
 
  » arxiv » 1307.6646

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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
AbstractPeer 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
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