A recent study into Social Norms and Petty Corruption investigated the reasons why Ghanaians may engage in bribe paying, based on an original survey of 1,400 citizens. A third of Ghanaian citizens report that they have paid a bribe during the last year. The sectors that are most corrupt are the police, followed by electricity and water.
The least corrupt sectors are health followed by education. Urban respondents are more likely to pay bribes than rural citizens. In part, this is explained by the fact that urban respondents are more likely to request public services than their rural counterparts.
The most common reasons for paying a bribe are to speed up the delivery of the service, to avoid going to the administrative office multiple times, and because citizens do not feel sure that they will get the service. These reasons suggest that people face a lot of uncertainty when they apply for public services and offer bribes as a way to combat this uncertainty. It also suggests that public servants can take advantage of the fact that people often have to travel a long way to visit an office or facility and can extract bribes because of this.
Ghanaians do not accept petty corruption as an acceptable practice and support harsh punishments for perpetrators. The vast majority of citizens want to see public servants who engage in corruption either removed from their jobs (35 percent) or imprisoned (42 percent). With high levels of public disapproval of petty corruption, it may seem puzzling why bribe-taking remains so common. This study investigated first, the types and extent of financial pressure on bureaucrats and, second, the extent to which these pressures vary between public and private sector workers, as well as between males and females.
Public sector workers face social pressure to provide financial support to their extended families, but private sector workers face equivalent pressure. We find that the average respondent expects a public sector worker earning 1,200 cedis a month ($300 USD) to give roughly one-quarter of this each month to their extended family. During family emergencies, such as funerals, citizens expect civil servants to donate a one-off payment equivalent to roughly one-third of their monthly salaries. However, the study does not find evidence that civil servants face more pressure than private sector workers earning an equivalent salary. Female bureaucrats are perceived to be just as corrupt of their male counterparts. These findings may be explained by the fact that female and male civil servants face equivalent social pressures, and opportunities, to use bribes to provide for their extended families.
Citizens are more likely to say corruption is understandable when civil servants use the money for a morally justifiable expense. While the vast majority of citizens disapprove of petty corruption, the study found that citizens are more likely to find petty corruption understandable when the reason to take the bribe is morally justifiable. For example, a small minority of citizens find petty corruption understandable if the money is to be used to pay for a child’s school fees or to pay for a parent’s hospital fees. These social norms are likely to open up the door to significant corruption by bureaucrats.
More information
The Social Norms and Petty Corruption research project was carried out by a team led by Professor Sarah Brierley (Washington University, St. Louis) and Eliz Ozdemir with support from UK Aid through the STAAC programme.
A full report is available upon request from STAAC-Ghana.