Organized crime casts a long shadow, driving violence and an illicit economy. But our research, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, has uncovered some more subtle dimensions to its influence, too. We’ve found that organized crime can undermine the civic honesty of ordinary, law abiding people.
Civic honesty means adhering to shared moral norms that characterize actions such as tax evasion, bribery or welfare fraud as unacceptable. Civic honesty is a cornerstone for a robust and thriving democracy. It creates a society where people follow rules not out of fear of reprisal but due to their moral convictions. That, in turn, lessens the need for intensive surveillance and costly punitive measures.
Typically, civic honesty is driven by trust in public bodies such as the government and police. This trust represents citizens’ stake in a tacit social contract according to which they perform their civic duties in exchange for the competency, fairness and reliability of their government.
However, the link between political trust and civic honesty varies substantially from country to country. We wanted to explore if the presence of organized crime was a factor in this variability.
To test this, we used an index of global organized crime to rate the influence of criminal groups in different countries and regions on a scale of 1 to 10. We included mafia-style groups with a clear structure and a recognizable name like the Cosa Nostra in Italy or the Yakuza in Japan, and looser criminal associations without a clear structure or name.
2023-07-25 10:48:02
Source from phys.org