Corruption and accountability deficits are undermining Nigeria’s democracy and economic development. Social norms and public attitudes are a key part of tackling this problem.
As a regional heavyweight in West Africa and the continent’s most populous democracy, Nigeria’s efforts to address fundamental challenges of accountable governance have significant wider implications for Africa’s political trajectory and future prosperity. Yet high levels of government corruption and accountability deficits remain at the heart of Nigeria’s struggles with insecurity, injustice and inequality. The misappropriation of the country’s public resources – in most cases with impunity – acts as a major constraint on development and democratic consolidation. Corruption distorts the purpose of government institutions and disrupts public services; inhibits legitimate business activity and investment; and undermines the rule of law by eroding the trustworthiness of the legal and judicial systems. A weak and compromised judicial system in turn allows elites to insulate themselves from accountability.
In confronting entrenched, systemic and cyclical corruption, effective and context-sensitive policy interventions first require an understanding of the underlying drivers of corrupt behaviour. An essential part of this picture, and one that is frequently overlooked, is understanding of how corruption may function as a collective practice, informed by social influences and context. Too often, corruption is treated as a product of the individual decision-making of ‘bad apples’. Through an analysis of extensive survey and qualitative data, this research paper seeks to evaluate the ways corrupt behaviours reflect individuals’ interdependence with others in their network and community, based on social expectations or norms.
The paper explores the social expectations and norms associated with three key and interrelated forms of corruption: judicial bribery; contract inflation; and the misappropriation of public funds by private contractors. It also explores the levels of public confidence in, and expectations of, institutions involved in anti-corruption responses in Nigeria. Understanding the role of social expectations and norms across these sectors provides a new perspective on existing bureaucratic accountability mechanisms and uncovers opportunities for improving both institutional trustworthiness and public confidence. Tackling the collective action problem of entrenched corruption requires a better understanding of the expectations, norms and pressures people face when corruption opportunities arise and they have to decide whether to go with or against the flow; whether to violate negative norms or adopt new positive ones.
A social norms approach to tackling corruption
Laws are not the only mechanisms that societies use to regulate behaviour. Social norms – defined as informally enforced social sanctions and rewards – are not formally codified or enforced, but shape the social acceptability of behaviour. They are a type of language that allows people to establish cooperative relationships with others, comply with expectations and signal belonging to a social group. Social norms are described as ‘shared understandings about actions that are obligatory, permitted or forbidden’ that ‘govern many parts of our everyday lives from economic and political decisions to cultural practices’. They also play an influential role in the persistence of behaviours like corruption and discrimination, despite the use of legal prohibitions to stop them.
Individual decisions and policy compliance are social processes that are intimately linked with expectations about the actions and beliefs of others. Non-compliance with social expectations or norms often signals uncooperativeness, which is punished by other group members through criticism, shaming, exclusion or withholding group benefits or recognition. Pressure to comply with certain norms can push individuals to take decisions that may harm their own long-term interests and those of their community. In this way, evidently detrimental behaviours can persist, regardless of whether those behaviours are economically efficient or socially beneficial.
Social expectations and norms can therefore encourage collective compliance, independent of the personal beliefs of individuals in a social group – as individuals are typically motivated to behave in ways that they believe will be accepted or endorsed by the people and communities that matter to them. This offers both a challenge and an opportunity to policymakers trying to influence collective practices such as corruption. Campaigns that seek to raise individual awareness of problems such as corruption are liable to fail. Even enhanced judicial sanction and enforcement may be insufficient if the collective social drivers of detrimental behaviour are not addressed. Decision-makers must think carefully about the social environment in their policy design and implementation efforts. In terms of designing effective policies, measuring the influence of social expectations on collective behaviours such as corruption can help to increase understanding of how those behaviours are enforced and become entrenched, but also of the conditions under which those expectations and behaviours may break down.
The Chatham House Africa Programme’s Social Norms and Accountable Governance (SNAG) project adopts an approach based on social norms methodology to systematically test for beliefs and expectations that inform individuals’ behaviours and their choices to accept or reject corruption. A central contribution of social norms approaches is that the willingness to engage in, accept, resist or report corruption is often strongly shaped by expectations of the actions likely to be taken by others, and by perceptions of what their community feels to be acceptable behaviour. The way in which these social beliefs and expectations manifest and change has profound implications on how corruption becomes normalized in society. Although laws and national policies are crucial for addressing systemic corruption, inconsistent political priorities, vested interests and impunity often hollow out these traditional top-down efforts. Social norms approaches can support bottom-up, middle-out and top-down efforts to disincentivize corruption. They can also create pressure on elites to comply with stronger and coordinated expectations of accountability.
Evidence from previous SNAG research has shown that the beliefs, norms and pressures people experience differ from one corrupt practice to the next, as do the reasons that people give for engaging in those practices. Respondents to various SNAG surveys have cited both moral and practical reasons for approving of, and engaging in, corrupt behaviours (see Box 1).
