Corruption erodes social trust more in democracies than in autocracies

It's well known that in authoritarian regimes (which autocracies generally are) corruption is, rather than a problem, a necessary element of society to keep things going.

Anyone with the slightest amount of official power, like a government officer, has the ability to prevent things going forward on his part. In this kind of society, most people are poor and it would be considered stupid to not demand a small (or large) bribe from the citizen in order to unlock the process. Everyone does it, more with outsiders and to a lesser extent with one's circle of acquaintances (because the social fabric between known parties is the other way to unlock things). Corruption surely is one thing that really trickles down from the top.

So, things like like obediently waiting in the queue for your turn or complaining about the officer won't help unlike in high-trust societies. If you try that in a low-trust society there will be additional documents, stamps, acknowledges, or signatures you need, and keep needing, in order to complete your request until you get the drift and bring a little something. Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait.

In Western democracies this sounds unimaginable because there's a stronger sense that right things will work out right just because of the rules. Western corruption happens on a different level: a regular western citizen has no benefit from giving bribes and he would object to the police or government officials from demanding one. Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.

You have to understand how gears shift from there. Trust is essential for business transactions and specifically for long term investments. You can’t make massive leaps in technology or medicine or many other areas without trust (a lot of money on a leap means if you don’t trust the other side or the government to keep conditions stable, you won’t see a return).

Now if you are in a high trust society, you may have a lot of leveraged businesses or governments who have gotten loans or permission to do something based on past trust history. If the trust degrades systematically Investors may want returns faster, or interest rates go up, or partnerships don’t happen. That’s why low trust places don’t grow as fast - trust is the oil for growth engines and lack of it is sand for the same.

Corruption also does a lot of small-profit-for-the-corrupt that leads to massive damage to the overall society via second and third order effects. (example: someone stealing copper cables that stop electricity to entire cities for a while).

It looks like a tautology to me. Like: "Corruption erodes social trust in places where social trust exist and is key for the political system."

Was talking about this with some colleagues who are from Ukraine, Russia, and other countries.

In the US, it seems corruption is only allowed at the top. If you tried to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket as a regular person, you'd get in big trouble, then meanwhile the president pardons wealthy fraudsters [1].

Meanwhile, in countries like Russia, everyone can get in on the action. A colleague of mine told me if he were to get drafted to the war, he knew exactly how much to pay and who to pay off locally to get his name off the list. It's equal opportunity corruption.

[1] - https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/28/nikola-founder-trevor-milt...

I think modern democracies and autocracies are really just proxies for societies where wealth begets power and where power begets wealth, respectively.

A rich person buying their way into power (either through gaining a formal position or influence) robs the people of that society of their power, which is a limited resource. There is no upside to it, if it were good for the people at large there would be no need for the corruption.

Conversely, a powerful person enriching themself can be a good thing. A crony being put in charge of a state owned corporation, for example, doesn't really take anything away from the common person. It's not like you were in line to be the CEO of a random oil company. So long as your material condition is improving, the rising tide is lifting your boat, who cares if the tide is also lifting someone else's bigger boat. This sort of corruption aligns the interests of the powerful with the economic well being of the nation - the better things are run, the more comfortable the leaders will be - and it's certainly preferable to other ways they could potentially abuse their power. Who wants to be lead by someone so incompetent that they can't find a way to skim a little off the top?

We in democratic society also don't really mind too much if a person achieves tremendous wealth so long as they don't dilute our power. Whether they be startup founders, business moguls, movie stars, rock stars, reality tv stars, socialites spending daddy's money, so long as they stay out of politics and avoid accusations of heinous crimes we not only put up with them, we idolize them. That's not to say that the Kardashians are morally equivalent to the current CEO of Gazprom in terms of how they gained their fortune, but none of us are under the illusion that their wealth is the consequence of hard work providing a much needed good or service to society at large, and if they leverage their status to make even more money that's not going to erode our social trust in any meaningful way.

And completely understandable once you understand the narratives of both system.

An autocrat is supposed to be "Powerful" beyond all else and typically aren't required to be accountable to anyone so as long as the narrative of "Powerfully competent" holds corruption is merely an part of the narrative.

In democracies the leadership is very much meant to be by and off the people and held accountable under the same legal standard they enforce on everyone else, and when that leadership start to act with the impunity of an "entrenched" aristocracy and stop following the rules the narrative breaks.

And lets not forget that the original feudal aristocracy held their position almost entirely by the mechanism of unchallengeable property rights in an zero sum economy* and we begin to understand why the accumulation of property/wealth into fewer and fewer hands is a almost unmanageable threat to the narratives of western democracy.

*We are returning to an zero sum economy as the planet have essentially run out of unowned/unused resources and that means that modern western economic solutions(grow grow grow) is simply not available anymore.

This does sort of feel like the kind of thing I might think and wonder about and then do a lot of work doing a study and some research and writing up an article and in the end everyone says "yeah, no duh!"

Corruption erodes social trust where social trust exists.

I think this research really suffers by not acknowledging that there are different types and scopes of corruption, and these different types impact societies in considerably different ways.

The "four types of corruption" breakdown by Yuen Yuen Ang I think is really informative here, with its two-axis breakdown (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption#:~:text=Petty%20the...).

Amalgamating all corruption into a single corruption index doesn't distinguish between these types, and it seems reasonable that different "flavors" of corruption impact social trust in different ways.

In a good autocracy, and a good democracy, people will trust the system will push out the corruption as the right people become privy to it. In a bad autocracy, the people had no power to make the decision and therefore can't even hold each other liable. In a bad democracy, people view their fellow denizen at fault. It all boils down to who holds the power, because then people know who to blame and give less trust to when things go south.

IMO corruption is just a symptom. Everything goes back to one source point: lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation. Note that the two conditions: well-educated and can push back without hesitation. Missing any of them and the foundation cracks.

Also I wouldn't bother comparing corruption between democracies and authoritarians. I have lived under both and the only thing I see is the common human nature represented in different ways. And I see "lack of well-educated citizens who can push back without hesitation" everywhere.

I guess that's why we are in a world that keeps competing for incompetence.

Is there a reason not to simplify this to: corruption erodes social trust more in high-trust societies than in societies where trust is already degraded? Meaning: is the type of government actually the controlling factor, or just code for high vs. low trust societies?

In a democracy, corruption is seen as the moral exception (if not impossibility), when it happens it's a bigger wound than in autocracy where the baseline is lower.

Of course. If there's no trust, you can't erode it (pointing finger to his temple meme jpg).

Of course. Because in a dictatorship your social trust is based only on other things than the govt while in a democracy your social trust is in the govt as well.

This resonates strongly from an African perspective. In countries like Kenya, corruption is almost an open secret — people expect it, budget for it, and navigate around it. Paradoxically that "normalized" corruption causes less acute trust erosion because nobody trusted the system deeply to begin with. In democracies the social contract is explicit — you voted, you participated, you expected accountability. Betraying that feels personal. The delta between expectation and reality is where trust dies. The real question isn't which system suffers more — it's which system has better recovery mechanisms when trust breaks down.

>accompanied by efforts to rebuild and maintain social trust: swift, visible accountability when corruption is discovered

This is essential - too often what we see is persecution of whistle-blowers instead ( with the wrong-headed logic that it's the revealing of wrong doing that's somehow the problem, rather than the wrong doing itself ).

Well yeah social trust is worse in autocracies, you'd imagine that corruption would be lower on the list of problems you perceive having when 1) you don't have a good press to report on them 2) you can be sent to jail basically wherever

like people in democracies do not know how good they have it!

This resonates strongly from an African perspective. In countries like Kenya, corruption is almost an open secret.people expect it, budget for it, and navigate around it. Paradoxically that "normalized" corruption causes less acute trust erosion because nobody trusted the system deeply to begin with. In democracies the social contract is explicit The real question isn't which system suffers more, but it's which system has better recovery mechanisms when trust breaks down.

So following this through, does it mean that autocracy is the preferred government for a country that sleepwalked past the tipping point where corruption is entrenched because the institutions that could uproot it are themselves deeply corrupt?

What corruption does to communism and democracy in Russia in years 1985 to 1999 is well documented in latest Adam Curtis documentary series Russia 1985–1999: TraumaZone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_1985%E2%80%931999:_Trau...

Something a lot of people don't understand about operating within a corrupt system -- the person paying the bribe is usually the one being controlled.

Yes, those who pay receive special benefits, but it is against the background threat of reprisal if you cease paying.

Hey, that's a nice software company, it would be a shame if something happened to it. By the way, my son is raising money for his new crypto venture. You should think about investing.

Everyone works for their community, and rewarding those who contribute the most by consensus is trust, regardless of gender, race, skill, or inheritance. The opposite is corruption.

People generally are saying the same thing, the more trust exists the more you got to lose.

However, it's not that simple there's a different kind of trust that comes with these types of social structures and they usually trust that as long as they keep their head down nothing will change. You can obviously draw parallels with conservatives here, but in reality people more often than not just want to live their life.

Democracies tend to be a lot more active politically and promote transparency so there is trust that your government is being transparent and that your vote matters. Of course if you find out that your political activism and votes don't accomplish anything due to corruption you check out and start disliking your government. Autocracies don't have political movements to begin with (exceptions apply) so it is way less impactful. There's way more comparisons to be made, but in general they roughly boil down to the same thing.

Yeah just look at ycombinator, they are all infected with bots

The Dictator's Handbook explained this in 2011: corruption in autocracies is the governance model — it's how you pay a small winning coalition to keep you in power . So citizens aren't surprised by it, they're just not in the coalition. The paper's contribution is putting a multilevel regression on what Bueno de Mesquita already drew as a diagram.

The top is always corrupt. When the bottom realizes this, then the poison has spread.

The good news is, we found a clever workaround for the corruption problems in government. The bad news...

Well obviously.

> From V-Dem, we use two measures of democratic quality: the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification and the Liberal Democracy Index. The RoW (Lührmann et al., 2018) is a categorical measure distinguishing closed autocracies (no multiparty elections), electoral autocracies (multiparty elections that are not free and fair), electoral democracies (free elections but limited liberal protections), and liberal democracies (free elections with strong liberal protections).

by "democracy" they of course mean liberalism

Corruption is rife in the West. Wealth managers wine and dine with governments and essentially order policies that nobody voted for that continue to be developed regardless of which party won the elections. Same faces meet with new cohorts of politicians and continue to get their way whilst security services supposed to protect democracy hide their heads in the sand.

See things like Digital ID, censorship, surveillance - nobody voted for this, but certain wealth managers want this to happen and so it takes priority over issues that actually people would want to be resolved (housing, healthcare to name a few).

I have been thinking about this more and more the past few points, to the point where I feel like I have to run for office as a social duty. (USA) There are so few politicians who give more than lip service to stopping corruption.

Our districts are embarrassing. People tolerating the blatant corruption by the Trump administration is something I don't understand. They will get upset about Epstein, but don't care about the corruption. (See for example the recent Jared Kushner contracts for one of many examples) Congress campaigns funded by PACs.

Phrases of interest: "Conflict of interest". "Shame". It is wild how people still vote for corrupted politicians, which is almost all of them. My parents are the prototype. If you take money from corporate-funded interests, you still have a conflict of interest, even if you aren't caught acting in the favor of those corporations.

and this is a good thing.

Corruption makes things more democratic in an autocracy by providing a mechanism of soft power by people not directly in the autocratic office.

Corruption makes things less democratic in a pure democracy by granting more soft power to some individuals' 1/N office ( N= population size).

yeah, no shit.

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BS data is BS. On what basis have they classified each country as a democracy or an autocracy?

Edit: this article is an example of a circular research. Create a narrative branding target entities - in this case countries - with a positive or negative characteristic. For some reason the Scandinavians revel in this.

Another example of compromised organisations are the various US govt funded "think tanks" which publish annual reports which are then used to classify whoever they want with whatever they want. Which then the US regime uses as a pretext for unprovoked attacks.

The West is an example of systemic corruption at the highest levels, surpassed only their citizens collective ignorance and hypocrisy.

Corruption in democracies is misinformation and a conspiracy theory nowadays.

The word democracy is so overused, the US is a plutocracy for instance.

Coffee is a roasted bean with hot water taking its essence.

What you're saying is that with the shift to autocracy, all these trust problems will become manageable?