Flying Under the Radar: How Frames Influence Public Officials’ Perceptions of Corruption

ABSTRACT: Authorities depict noncompliance by public officials (POs) as a problematic deviation they seek to address by several means. This article discusses the problem as a situation where the public’s reframing opportunities guide POs toward the acceptance of noncompliant behavior. This novel approach is underpinned by a behavioral model of decision-making processes. The pre-decision-making processes of POs are altered by actors who reframe efforts through narratives that affect the way POs make sense of a situation, their evaluation of the appropriateness of alternative actions, and their willingness to accept rule breaking. We use administrative corruption as a case of noncompliance to design a survey experiment applied to POs in a local government in Mexico. The survey adapts rationalizations of administrative corruption to test how narrative frames affect PO decision making, where a zone of noncompliance becomes acceptable.   

CITATION: Meza, O., & Zizumbo-Colunga, D. (2021). Constructions of noncompliance: narratives and contexts in the case of administrative corruption. International Public Management Journal, 24(5), 623–645. https://doi.org/10.1080/10967494.2020.1793041

Note: What follows is the authors' pre-print version. The final published version can be accessed [HERE]

1. Introduction

Authorities depict noncompliance by public officials (POs) as a problematic deviation that they seek to address by several means. The literature describes compliance as situations in which people abide by the rules, according to their awareness of existing regulations or incentives (Becker 1968; Braithwaite 2006; Scholz and Lubel 1998; Weaver 2015). Yet recent research has challenged these notions (Feldman and Halali 2017; Kelly and Barker 2016), and the literature has tended to overlook the nature of the interactions between policy targets and the state. Key findings have pointed to the importance of these interactions in negotiating compliance in public-management contexts (Braithwaite 2006; Gofen 2015; Gofen, Blomqvist, Needham, Warren, and Winblad 2018; Gofen and Needham 2015; Jensen and Pedersen 2017; Pedersen, Stritch, and Thuesen 2018; Worthy, John, and Vannoni 2017). 

Building on this literature and linking it to previous theoretical appraisals (Vaughan 1999), this study addresses the relational nature of policy targets and state actors (Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2000), emphasizing how human interactions within organizations encourage POs to noncomply. POs’ rule-following behavior, as expected, may neglect the interests of actors with whom they serve or interact, resulting in POs facing a dilemma—either comply with the rules to the detriment of targets’ interests, or not comply and help others. This article explores under which contexts public officials are more willing to noncomply. 

The main argument is that framing narratives alter POs’ pre-decision-making processes (Simon 1956; 1972; 1990; Jones 2003; Jones 2017; March and Olsen 2008). Such alterations occur by changing the way POs make sense of a situation, and then the way they evaluate the circumstances they encounter and their willingness to accept stepping into a zone of noncompliance. This contention is underpinned by previous literature highlighting the influence of frames on behavior (Epstein, Nisbet, and Gillespie 2011; Goffman 1974; Vaughan 1999) provided through narratives and contexts (Jones 2018; Jones, Shanahan, and McBeth 2014) that aim to persuade POs to accept deviant behavior. By introducing the concept of a zone of noncompliance, we argue that under certain circumstances with different narrative frames and contexts, POs become more willing to break the rules. 

The article contributes in at least three ways. First, it attempts to bridge a gap in public-administration studies by linking the literatures on compliance, decision-making, and framing. The study covers administrative corruption (Banuri and Eckel 2012; Werner 1983) as an example of a situation where POs, regardless of their motivations, decide not to comply with rules. Administrative corruption is a highly rationalized action, often fully ingrained into organizational culture (Arellano Gault 2016). Corrupt-like actions such as these are frequently sagaciously subject to reframing narratives aiming to reshape POs’ willingness to participate. A section is devoted to explaining how administrative corruption helps break down the empirical strategy.

Second, this research contributes to the literature on public administration of noncompliance by inquiring into plausible explanations through psychological and behavioral approaches (Grimmelikhuijsen, Jilke, Olsen, and Tummers 2017), which improves our understanding of how narrative frames affect decision making. An accepted zone of noncompliance is a term coined to explain the psychological pre-decision-making operations (Simon 1956; 1972; 1990) in which POs engage before deciding not to comply with rules. Addressing the nature of these mental operations highlights the importance of considering alternative compliance promoting policies that depart from the traditional approaches that involve tightening command and control measures, or the prosecution of specific actors. This study highlights the possibility of working with POs’ compliance disposition, preventing POs’ dismissal of the public interest when they act as agents of the state (Bozeman, Molina, and Kaufmann 2017; Nabatchi 2017) through the development of adequate protocols to process value conflicts when they arise in day-to-day governmental work. It places greater emphasis on the moment of the interaction that occur between POs and the people they have to deal with.

Third, the study contributes to the existing literature on local government corruption (Beeri and Navot 2013; Neshkova and Kalesnikaite 2019) by evaluating this phenomenon in a context traditionally considered extremely difficult to study (Jancsics and Jávor 2012; Jávor and Jancsics 2016). The research design implements a vignette experiment embedded in a survey conducted on a sample of POs (N¼651) that was possible after a long process of establishing rapport with the authorities which we explain in the methods section. The results are consistent with the idea that narrative frames persuade POs to step into a zone of noncompliance, however, POs’ willingness to noncomply depends on the context where the interaction occurs. We discuss how these results are consistent with existing theoretical frameworks that uses narratives to explain behavior within various aspects of the policy process (Jones 2018; Jones, Shanahan, and McBeth 2014).

The article is organized by introducing first the notion of the accepted zone of noncompliance. The aim is to explain the new research opportunities that arise with a more psychological decision-making model of noncompliant behavior. The second section summarizes the relevant literature explaining a zone of noncompliance, more specifically how a framing analysis can help shed light on POs’ accepted zone of noncompliance. This section develops the main propositions. The third section proposes administrative corruption as our case study. Rationalization is a feature of administrative corruption that provides the theoretical basis to formulate our testable hypotheses. The research design uses these rationalizations to create narrative treatments to test POs’ willingness to break the rules. The next section explains the research design, data, and method of analysis. In the final section, we present and discuss the results.

2. Accepted Zone Of Noncompliance

Portrayed by scholars as a discrete situation in which individuals fail to follow organizational norms, noncompliance is said to result from unclear regulation, inadequate incentives, insufficiently vigilant oversight, and low levels of trust (Becker 1968; Braithwaite 2006; Feldman and Halali 2017; Schneider and Ingram 1990; Scholz and Lubel 1998; Weaver 2015). In public policy and administration literature, the capacity of POs to use their discretion when implementing policy has gained considerable attention (Evans and Harris 2004; Gassner and Gofen 2018; Hill and Hupe 2003; Hupe and Hill 2007). Yet quite frequently, PO use of discretion is regarded in a normative perspective, as something that is against compliance, so scholars tend to neglect alternative lines of inquiry (Weaver 2015; Gofen 2015). Such lines of inquiry study how discretion is managed by POs as tools that promote a behavior that is more compliant with policies, as in the case of vaccination policies in Israel, where healthcare workers’ discretion has led to an increase in vaccination rates among a regular noncompliant sector of the population (Gofen & Needham 2015). This recent research on discretion yields the opportunity to explore noncompliance observing the relation between POs and the people they have to deal with in their everyday practice. An earlier exception is the work by Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000), who state that public officials’ efforts to secure public compliance captures the notion of being a state-agent who seeks to achieve the goals of government, as opposed to being a citizen-agent, which might involve breaking the rules to satisfy citizens’ preferences (Gofen et al. 2018). Accordingly, the nature of citizen–state interactions, defined as spaces and opportunities where state agents interact with policy targets, depicts a less explored field to understand POs’ noncompliant behavior. This article aims to appreciate the complexity and explore a nuanced vision of noncompliant behavior involving a more psychological basis of the PO decision-making process. 

Based on the idea of POs’ willingness to noncomply seen as a set of pre-decision-making operations, the argument is that at a certain point, failure to comply becomes an acceptable action. This situation is termed here as POs’ accepted zone of noncompliance. Stepping into a zone of noncompliance resembles the behavioral decision-making model introduced first by Simon (1956, 1972, 1990) and discussed subsequently by other scholars (Bendor 2015; Jones 2003; Jones 2017). This behavioral decision-making model implies a couple of critical pre-decision phases—a recognition phase, where POs make sense of the situation they face; and a phase where actors process alternative paths, choosing a satisficing course of action (Simon 1990; Jones 2003; Jones 2017; Simon 1956; Simon 1972). Similar to the “logic of appropriateness” (March and Olsen 2008), pre-decision making operations take place when, before the act, individuals must answer questions such as “who am I?,” and “what should someone in my position do?”. The argument is that inputs in the pre-decision-making phases explain POs’ decisions to comply. Frames, which we will define in a later section, affect a subset of the pre-decision-making inputs, altering POs’ (a) sense making of the situation, (b) evaluation of the appropriate course of action, and finally (c) willingness to act accordingly. Ultimately, these pre-decision operations direct the construction of POs’ accepted zone of noncompliance. 

2.1. Frames for Accepting Zones of Noncompliance

There are three major explanations in line with a normative drive to ensure compliance—(1) the rational utility-maximizing theory (Becker 1968); (2) the social and moral suasion stream (Braithwaite 1985; Weaver 2015; Winter and May 2001); and (3) the ideological framework hypothesis (Schneider and Ingram 1990; Winter and May 2001). Due perhaps to the normative drive imprinted in the study of compliance, in contrast to this literature and with few exceptions (Vaughan 1999), explanations of noncompliant behavior within public administration literature have been more disperse. At least four approaches to agent discretion organize accounts of noncompliance. Intrinsic motivation is the first approach. It emphasizes empathy levels toward citizen-clients, or bureaucrats’ social construction of target populations formed either by cultural, religious, race, or social class identities (Jensen and Pedersen 2017; May 2012; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2000; Olson 2016; Pedersen et al. 2018; Pierce et al. 2014; Schneider and Ingram 1993; Soss, Fording, and Schram 2008). The second approach focuses on extrinsic factors (Riccucci 2005; Scott 1997), where for instance professional ethos clash with internal organizational rules, hindering rule-following behavior (Borry et al. 2018). The third approach refers to organizational explanations, such as exposure to corrupt peers, which affect the willingness to ignore the rules (Belle and Cantarelli 2017), or certain organizational practices that legitimize noncompliance to exploit feedback mechanisms useful for policy design (Gofen 2014, 2015). The fourth approach is environmental features, which, in conjunction with organizational factors, explain noncompliance. An example is the high level of environmental uncertainty faced by organizations, that if coupled with high goals for POs to achieve, it may promote noncompliance with internal rules. Oberfield’s account of police officers showed how performance in the street could not be possible if they should strictly adhere to the rules: “you won’t survive living by the code” (Oberfield, 2010: 747). Furthermore, organizations may signal POs to mitigate risks of “hot cases” with high media interests, even if these actions require deviations from preexistent policy guidelines (Jones 2003).

Meanwhile, accepting a zone of noncompliance implies an active role by POs disposed to deviate from existing rules. This role has led to the development of concepts such as “the bureaucratic agent” (Thompson 1977), or “unbureaucratic personality” (Dehart-Davis 2007), grounded in personal traits that are assumed to influence noncompliance. Beyond individual traits, the acceptance of a zone of noncompliance resembles a resolution that emerges from POs facing an ethical dilemma (O’Leary 2014), such as the use of PO discretion to “orchestrate outcomes that are compatible with their [POs’] visions of justice” (Kelly 1994,119). While several causes fit well within a behavioral decision-making process, this research focuses on the effects of narrative frames, also known as stories, in explaining POs’ willingness to accept a zone of noncompliance.

Goffman (1974) defines frames as interpretative packages that allow individuals to locate, identify, and label issues related to the meaning of a situation within their context (Epstein et al. 2011). Different mechanisms affect interpretations via frames (Pleger, Lutz, and Sager 2018). The one explored here is related to a blind spot defined as “well-learned sets of associations that focus people’s attention on and label some aspects of a situation to the exclusion of others” (Moberg 2006, 414). Blind spots drive mental heuristics that interplay in human agency (Jones 2017; Gigerenzer 2007). Researchers in behavioral ethics use blind spots as a concept to explain why “good people” (Feldman and Halali 2017) fail to comply with prescribed behavior (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011). In this sense, the narrative frames are story-like devices that create blind spots in ways that persuade POs to overcome ethical dilemmas or contradictions; frames affect the saliency of a subset of obligations (Waldo 1988) to which POs pay special attention when deciding how to act.

Narrative frames have attracted considerable attention in policy and public administration studies (Jones and Radaelli 2015; Ospina and Dodge 2005). This literature provides the basis to understand the nuances behind POs’ willingness to step into a zone of noncompliance. Narrative frames produce stories that are rooted in at least two aspects—the narrative or agency motivation, and the setting or context. Setting (context) is the place where the story develops. A certain narrative layout in a different context may well produce a different narrative frame (or underlying story). Therefore, based on the literature, it is argued that narrative frames with an acceptable storyline can help POs to reconcile the dilemmas they face by increasing the acceptability of a zone of noncompliance. Consequently,

Proposition (P1): Narrative frames (stories) affect POs’ willingness to accept a zone of noncompliance.

Additionally, narrative frames involve implicitly a plot or a policy problem, a moral or a policy solution, and the interplay of characters such as heroes, victims, and villains (Jones et al. 2014,14). Frames seeking to create blind spots highlight the saliency of characters with which people frequently become emotionally involved (Jones 2014b; Shanahan, Jones, McBeth, and Lane 2013). The narrative-policy framework provides a basis from which to propose how the way that characters interplay may affect individual policy decisions (Jones et al. 2014). Accordingly,

Proposition (P2): Narrative frames’ effectiveness depends on the interaction of characters in the underlying story provided in the narrative frame.

Research on the topic finds that narratives that identify heroes are found to be more persuasive in making people accept the story or accept the policy idea (Jones 2014b, 2014a; Shanahan, Jones, McBeth, and Lane 2013). Although, the evidence in the efficacy of stories that identify heroes is still mixed (Zanocco, Song, and Jones 2018). This opens opportunities to investigate further on the topic. Our research explores the persuasive power of a narrative depending on its link to a specific context (Lybecker, McBeth, and Kusko 2013; McBeth, Lybecker, and Garner 2010) and its credibility in regards to the overall interrelation of the characters.  

2.2. Administrative Corruption is a Type of Noncompliance

Administrative corruption is a special kind of noncompliant behavior. This kind of corruption is associated with venal or petit corruption (Bozeman, Molina, and Kaufmann 2018), seen mainly as a dyadic operation (Warburton 2013). The case is strategically useful because it epitomizes the experience of POs’ interactions when they decide to accept a zone of noncompliance. It is extremely difficult to isolate individuals’ motivations in noncompliant behavior, especially in administrative corruption, which enables rationalization-yielding opportunities for POs to redraw their notion of acceptable rule-deviation (Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011; Zamir and Sulitzeanu-Kenan 2017). Therefore, and regardless of the ultimate motivations behind POs’ actions, administrative corruption reflects a type of noncompliant behavior that is prone to many forms of justification. This article takes advantage of this feature to shape its overall empirical strategy.

Research on the topic identifies at least four underlying narratives to justify administrative corruption. The first narrative makes administrative rigidity a salient issue. Recurrent defenses of bribery focus on the arbitrariness of public officials. As a result, authors have suggested that administrative corruption is useful and necessary to avoid administrative burden (Rose-Ackerman 1999; Tan, Liu, Huang, and Zheng 2017). It is a form of reducing POs’ rigidity and strictness, and in this respect, corruption improves social welfare by avoiding cumbersome regulations (Ades and Di Tella 1996, 1997).

The second narrative is that it prevents inefficiency. People value their time, so additional payments give POs incentives to work quickly and grease the wheels of bureaucracy (Rose-Ackerman 1999; Pierre_Guillaume and Sekkat 2005). Citizens do not consider giving bribes when service is efficient (Zalpa, Tapia, and Reyes 2014); rigidity refers to personnel strictness, whereas inefficiency refers to the system-led transaction costs in the bureaucratic process. 

The third narrative focuses on the issue of redistribution, which promotes the welfare of others or the public in general. This narrative represents a complex dilemma in many Western countries (Gupta 2005) but less so in others where the benefits of corruption are assumed to be shared by others, including one’s extended family, offspring, or community (Bukuluki 2013). In this case, corruption enjoys greater acceptance because such behavior reduces the burden on disadvantaged groups. In Australia, for example, Gorta and Farell (1995) find public officials to justify their support for controversial acts by appealing to redistiribution and Pinto (2008) as well as Arellano-Gault (2016) argue that individuals in organizations  in which corruption has become institutionalized tend to belief that some small bribes are justified by their capacity of preventing helpless individuals from suffering worse consequences  (in Arellano Gault 2016), and so eventually these acts becomes socialized and normalized.

The fourth narrative sees corruption as Pareto efficiency. It is a win–win game; either everyone wins or at least no one becomes the victim (Arellano Gault 2016). “When you steal from the government you are stealing from nobody” (Bukuluki 2013, 33). Since citizens perceive that there is no harm in stealing from an abstract entity (Bukuluki 2013, 33), they may attempt to persuade POs to think in the same way. Moreover, because citizens tend to perceive deviant acts that have no harmful consequences for the public as less worthy of sanctioning (Lascoumes and Tomescu-Hatto, 2008), they may attempt to dress up corruption in a way in which welfare-loss is overlooked (Ades and Di Tella 1997; Treisman 2007). Yet so far Pareto efficiency has been appraised as a relevant dimension determining citizen’s view of corruption, less is known as a virtue to which clients appeal when attempting to persuade bureaucrats to step into a zone of noncompliance.

3. Research Design

Under what conditions do narrative frames affect public officials’ willingness to accept a zone of noncompliance? Examining the way narratives and contexts together persuade them is the first step toward a more sophisticated understanding of administrative corruption and noncompliance in general. The experimental methodology has previously served to underpin the effect of narrative treatments on behavior (Epstein et al. 2011; Jones 2014b; Piotrowski, Grimmelikhuijsen, and Deat 2017; Pleger et al. 2018), but this is the first attempt to employ this strategy to gauge directly the capacity of frames to shape POs’ willingness to accept a zone of noncompliance. In this study, the effect of narrative frames was assessed by asking POs to evaluate a set of hypothetical corrupt-like situations in which the narrative frame used by one of the actors was randomly varied. 

3.1. Survey Sample

Data was taken from a randomized sample of POs in a local government in Mexico in November 2017. As part of an overall study of transparency and anti-corruption policies (Meza 2019), and before any significant intervention was performed with the local government, authorities provided unique clearance to conduct an independent and probabilistic survey with its personnel. Mexico is exceptional in its levels of corruption in Latin America, ranking consistently among the three countries where it is most prevalent (Zizumbo-Colunga and Martinez, 2020). Yet according to the 2017 National Survey on Quality and Governmental Impact (ENCIG, in Spanish), the municipality studied is in a state perceived as one of the five least-corrupt in the country (ENCIG-INEGI, 2017). Thus, POs interviewed here are probably typical, or at least not radically different from other POs working in provincial urban municipalities across the continent.

Researchers conducted the sampling from the payroll registered by the municipality’s Human Resource Department (HR). A blinded code-list rather than personal names served to sample respondents and avoid post-identification.1 The sample is proportional to the size of the municipality’s 50 departments, stratified at three levels of bureaucracy (heads of department, mid-level, and operations POs). Both the stratification and the proportional sampling are critical because the analysis considered heterogeneous attitudes and behaviors of POs across strata and departments. Identification of these two features allows us to mitigate risks of sample bias, but due to the size of the sample, the analysis in this study cannot provide for statistically valid subsample estimates. The original sample was comprised of 737 out of a universe of 3,500 POs and is representative of the municipal government as a whole, with a confidence level of 95 percent and an error margin of m=0.05 for each of the three levels of bureaucracy (heads of department, mid-level, and operations POs). 

After respondents were selected, HR sent sampled POs an invitation to participate in a Survey for the Construction of a Transparency Accountability and Anti-corruption System. On the day of the survey, a member of the research team went to each of the departments and reserved a small private room where tables, tablets, and chairs were mounted. At the site, sampled POs were called in small groups providing them with a 9-inch tablet and placed each interviewee in an isolated space, for the reading of an informed consent and confidentiality statement. These procedure allowed certain degree of privacy to mitigate the possibility of interviewees to respond in ways others expect them to (demand effects). Thanks to the support of local authorities, the survey reached a response rate of approximately 88%. Substitutions were allowed only if the initially sampled respondent was either sick or absent during the days of fieldwork. When such was the case, POs were substituted by someone working in their same department, at their same hierarchical level, and when possible, of their same gender. In total, the sample reached 651 POs (of a projected N of 737), with a substitution rate of less than 10%.

After reading and agreeing to the informed consent section in the survey, interviewees responded to a series of demographic questions, queries about their experiences working in the municipality, and questions about their attitudes toward the local transparency system. After these sections where completed, interviewees participated in the experimental task described in the following section. Anticipating answers with a high level of social desirability, we included a social desirability scale. We found no evidence that social desirability was different between treatment and control groups (see Appendix D for details of this test). 

3.2. Experimental Design

After the first section of the study, POs had unlimited time to read and react to three hypothetical conversations (context) involving a PO and an interlocutor (a citizen or another PO). The three conversations were identical in that they included (a) the counterpart asking the PO not to comply with an administrative procedure, and (b) the counterpart offering a narrative frame to justify his or her request. They were different in that they occurred in different contexts. One occurred at the counter (see the example below); another occurred in an acquisition process where a PO requests that another PO waive the formal acquisition protocol in a government purchase. The last one presents a budgetary accountability dilemma where a PO asks another PO to conceal excess travel expenses by changing the item budget-label to coffee and water purchases (see full details in Appendix A). Figure 1 shows a diagram of the experiment.

The following is an example of the At the counter context:

Interaction:

Bureaucrat: “I am sorry, you do not have all documents needed to complete the procedure; I will have to deny you the permit.”

Citizen: “Please, help me and give me the permit … [Narrative framing with an extra sentence]”

Narrative Treatments [one of the following]:

• Rigidity: “There is only one item missing to comply with everything.”

• Inefficiency: “Otherwise, I’ll miss the opportunity once the permit arrives.”

• Redistribution: “If it’s approved, people with scarce resources will benefit from it.”

• Pareto: “It will help me a lot, and no one loses out.”

• Control group: The counterpart offers no narrative.

The context design identifies a set of typical administrative accountability situations in the local administration associated with administrative burdens, procedures, and transparency. The research team chose the contexts after previous interviews with POs in the local government, as part of the rapport, which took place under the terms of a more extensive research work carried out in the local government.  

Within each conversation, the context and the request made during the talk were held constant, but the narrative frame given by the counterpart was randomly assigned. The treatment consisted of a counterpart giving a narrative frame when asked to respond to a situation. The frames were the following: Rigidity frame, an Inefficiency frame, a Redistribution frame, a Pareto frame, and no narrative frame (Control). Table 1 shows the distribution among treatments across the three contexts. 

The random assignment yielded groups with a very similar number of responses. Figure 2 shows the distribution of respondents working in different departments across the five experimental conditions.2

Again, as the figure shows, each experimental condition includes a very similar number of POs from the 50 different departments in the municipality (see Appendix E for details on strata assortment). The evidence suggests that randomization yielded balanced groups, thus achieving the asymptotic assumptions underlying the internal validity of experiments.

3.3. Measurements, Data, and Analytical Model

POs’ acceptance of a zone of noncompliance was measured based on our theoretical pre-decision-making model, revealed in three questions. A seven-point Likert-scale, where 7 is “very much” and 1 is “not at all,” was used to measure POs’ sense making, evaluation, and willingness to act in each situation by answering the following three questions: 

Make sense: How corrupt is this situation? Where 1 is not corrupt at all and 7 is very corrupt.

Evaluate: How justifiable is this situation? Where 1 is not justifiable at all and 7 is very justifiable.

Be willing to engage: What are the chances of my doing the favor (participate)? Where 1 is not likely at all and 7 is very likely to buy in.

Positive values in the first question (make sense) indicate POs lesser willingness to step into zones of noncompliance.  In contrast, positive values in the last two items (evaluate and willingness to engage) indicate POs greater willingness to step into these zones. Descriptive statistics in Table 2 show, on the contrary, an overall tendency by POs to avoid stepping into these types of zones. In general, POs tended to perceive all three situations as very corrupt and did not seem to justify or be willing to buy into them.

These findings change once the data is analyzed and the experimental nature of the survey is exploited. Nine independent ordered logistic regression models were specified, one for each dependent k variable within each of the three different j contexts. Thus, treatment effects and error terms are independent within each model. Equation 1 shows a generalized version of the specified model:

where DV represents one of the three dependent variables, ϕ' is a vector of coefficients of interest, Treatment' is a vector of four dichotomous variables identifying each narrative frame, and ε represents a residual random error term clustered at the hierarchy level. Tables present results in both coefficients and percent change in odds of Y for a given change in X (control vs. treatment).3

4. Results: Narrative Frames and Accepted Zone of Noncompliance

A conclusion stemming from the results in Table 1 is that POs regarded the encountered contexts as corrupt, unjustifiable, and something in which they were not willing to participate (buy into). Yet the aggregate analyses show that the narrative treatments affected successfully the POs’ perception in terms of the corruptness, the justification of actions, and their perceived proclivity to buy in. Redistribution and rigidity narrative treatments were effective in lowering the perception of corruptness of the actions. The analysis recorded Pareto and redistribution treatments as affecting positively the perception of action justifications. Finally, Pareto, rigidity, and redistribution treatment narratives affected positively POs’ willingness to participate (see details on statistics in Appendix C).

While in general narrative treatments changed respondents’ perception in the expected direction, Table 3 shows support for proposition 2. That is, it shows that the effectiveness of narrative frames depends on the context.

In terms of the coefficient, in two out of three contexts, the rigidity narrative (column 1) was more successful in persuading POs to accept a zone of noncompliance. In the at the counter context, compared to the control group, POs perceived the act as less corrupt (-0.35 at p<0.01) and were willing to accept the favor requested (0.64 at p<0.01). Similarly, in the budget dilemma, the narrative made POs perceive the act as less corrupt (-0.24 at p<0.05), and their willingness to buy in increased (0.30 at p<0.01). In the acquisition process, however, the narrative had a positive effect only on the justification of the act (0.21 at p<0.05).

After rigidity, the second-most-effective treatment across all contexts was redistribution (column 3). This treatment was highly effective in the at the counter context, reducing the perception of the corruptness of the act (-0.56 at p<0.05), expanding the perception of the action as justifiable (0.53 at p<0.05), and increasing the willingness of POs to participate (0.86 at p<0.05). The treatment was somewhat less effective in the other two contexts. In the acquisition process, the treatment reduced only the perception of the act as corrupt (-0.43 at p<0.1), and in the budget accountability context, the effect was visible only in the willingness of bureaucrats to buy into the act. Interestingly, this narrative treatment produced less desire to buy in when compared to the control group (-0.30 p< 0.05). 

The inefficiency narrative treatment had a strong effect in only one context (column 2), making POs justify the act (0.24 at p<0.05) in the at the counter context, and it increased the willingness of POs to buy in (0.55 at p<0.1). The analysis found no other significant effects.

Finally, in contrast to the aggregate-level analysis, the Pareto narrative treatment was found to be the least-effective in persuading bureaucrats to accept a zone of noncompliance (column 4). Results showed an effect only on increasing the justification of the corrupt action within the acquisition process (0.29 at p< 0.1). No other differences appear to be relevant or significant concerning the control group in any other context.

5. Results: Narrative Frames and Accepted Zone of Noncompliance

Regarding P2, results suggest that the effectiveness of the narrative frames changed according to the different combinations of narrative treatments and context. Willingness to accept a zone of noncompliance depended on the likelihood of bureaucrats to engage in the story’s premise. POs exerted systematic behavior according to the overall roleplay of characters. To compare, Table 4 provides the magnitudes of the narrative treatments, presenting results in terms of percent change in odds of Y for a given change in X (control vs. treatment). 

The effectiveness of narrative frames depends on the context in which the characters in the story interact, according to the narrative treatment. A typical story has a hero engaging in moral action, a villain, and a victim of the plot. In the at the counter context, the villain and the hero are most likely to be the same person—the implicated PO (see Appendix A). She exercises her discretionary power to change outcomes or to keep within her strict adherence to the rules. A victim exists, who is a citizen in this case. Narrative treatments of rigidity, redistribution, and inefficiency within the at the counter context produce an acceptable frame that persuades POs to accept a zone of noncompliance, and the magnitudes in the coefficients of the buying-in measurements are considerable in terms of the percent change in odds (see column 1 in Table 4). 

Outcomes in the same vein are less evident in the other two contexts. An example is the acquisition process context, where a PO asks another PO to deviate from the normal acquisition process. As long as the potential hero remains the PO, the favor seems more private-oriented. The plausible victim is either a provider or another PO, and the villain could be either the implicated PO or the system in general. POs see the act as corrupt (see Table 4, column 2), and no narrative treatment persuades them to buy into the favor requested. Across narrative treatments, this context presented an overall story that failed to alter POs’ willingness to agree to break the rules.

The budget accountability dilemma is somewhat in the middle. The overall story is one where a PO asks another PO to lie about traveling expenses. Note that the plausible hero is the implicated PO, the villain is either himself or the system, and the victim is a department within the organization. The rigidity narrative persuaded POs to accept the zone of noncompliance and made POs regard the act as slightly less corrupt, but the redistribution narrative treatment strongly rejects doing the favor (see Table 4, column 3). 

From the resulting evidence, the analysis suggests further propositions on the link between the roleplaying of characters, narrative treatments, and willingness to accept a zone of noncompliance. First, POs are willing to become the hero of the story provided that the victim is a deserving entity, a citizen rather than a bureaucrat in this case. POs’ tendency to reject a zone of noncompliance was mostly present when there was a lack of clarity about helping a citizen or a group of people in need. Recall the redistribution narrative, which made POs reject strongly a zone of noncompliance in the case of an undeserving entity. Second, POs are willing to become the hero in the story, provided the villain is not the system. In our sample, bureaucrats’ tendency to reject a zone of noncompliance was evident when the villain seemed to be the rules themselves. In general, results suggest that narrative frames affect POs’ sense making, evaluation of the situation, and ultimately, their willingness to accept a zone of noncompliance. Furthermore, they show that the effectiveness of the narrative treatment was different but somewhat systematic across the different contexts.  

6. Discussion

The story the actors gave POs affected the willingness of the latter to accept a zone of noncompliance. According to the behavioral model of pre-decision-making in Simon (1956, 1972) and discussed by others (Bendor 2015; Jones, 2002, 2003, 2017; March and Olsen 2008), the stories embodied in the narrative frames altered POs’ pre-decision-making operations such as sense making and evaluation of the situation, and ultimately their willingness to do something which, in other circumstances, they would refuse to do. This article depicts noncompliance as part of a discretionary judgment where the reference point resides in the interaction between a policy target and the PO. More precisely, this approach shows the influence exerted over POs by interlocutors to recreate a satisfying story. In line with Shanahan et al. (2013), outcomes based on characters’ ability to persuade POs to change their minds depended on the narrative frame provided. In this case, stories that portrayed POs as both the villain and the possible hero were sufficiently persuasive, for instance in an at the counter context where POs are asked to dismiss a rule to favor a citizen in need.

Conversely, the redistribution narrative treatment caused POs to reject a zone of noncompliance when applied to the budgetary dilemma. Both the latter and the former results seem to support Kelly’s (1994) ideas on bureaucrats seeking outcomes compatible with their visions of justice. In line with Dehart-Davis (2007), who found POs’ rule-bending behavior to be negatively correlated to risk aversion, results in our experiments reveal lower levels of effectiveness when stories placed POs against the system. In particular, we found that in contexts of budget dilemma and the acquisition process, stories asking POs to break a rule to deviate from the system’s administrative intricacies seemed less effective. This finding aligns with Zamir and Sulitzeanu-Kenan's (2017, 585) argument that the higher the saliency of the conflict of interest (i.e., going against the system), the lower the POs’ willingness to make self-serving decisions, and with Zanocco, Song, and Jones' (2018, 995) contention that some narratives fail to provide a compelling story of a hero when the system is set as the main opposition  

Moreover, findings bring to the surface what Vaughan (1999) called the dark side of organizations. Behaviors are assembled by a “system responsible for the production of routine nonconformity [including] the environment of organizations, the organizations’ characteristics and the cognitive practices of individuals” (Vaughan 1999, 274). This article emphasizes the cognitive process of individuals in the context provided by organizational environments, but results do not neglect the other related aspects. The contexts in the experiments reflect organizational characteristics where actor interactions affect POs’ cognitive processes. 

The environment of organizations is relevant, especially in our experiment, which took place in a local government where authorities and public officials agreed to participate in a politically sensitive topic. Authorities’ disposition to evaluate POs could have altered their answers. While social desirability levels do not vary between control and treatment groups (see Appendix D for details on the test), our findings present at most a conservative estimate of the power of narrative frames. Future iterations of these experiments should place attention on a diverging set of environmental attributes, which brings us to a discussion on the validity of our results.

The survey experiment provides advantages to gain internal validity in findings (Baekgaard et al. 2015) and is thus an interesting way to explore answers to questions about noncompliance. While the municipal government studied here resembles an urban provincial-level context, generalizations of our findings are valid in similar places in the world, except for those places where a public-service ethos is emphasized, and which are typically found in localities where bureucracies’ professionalization is highly encouraged. Local governments lacking adecquate professionalization schemes may find advantageous, as our results suggests, to work with POs’ value systems to prevent noncompliance and to assure that POs could take decisions in line with what the public interest is (Bozeman, Molina, and Kaufmann 2017; Nabatchi 2017) Part of this work may require attention in the design and the development of special public-service protocols which allow POs to process value conflicts when they arise in the day-to-day governmental work.

In addition, future experimental research should address situations with higher levels of corruption to understand how sensitive POs are to narratives in other organizational contexts. Pareto narrative frames implying an informal, socially accepted, illicit association (Jancsics and Jávor 2012; Jávor and Jancsics 2016) could find higher acceptability in places where corruption has become more widespread. Further investigation is needed because corruption is deeply ingrained in the culture of organizations, and social boundaries determine what acceptable behavior is (Arellano Gault 2016; Gupta 2005; Kristin Sissener 2001), so the efficacy of narrative treatments may be conditional to organizational contexts. This paper represents simply the start of a broader research agenda that we encourage others to follow.

Finally, we offer a note about the capacity of the findings to be extrapolated to other policy areas. Since this is the first approximation to the study of narrative frames applied to noncompliance behavior, the claim we emphasize is that the effect of narrative frames depends on the context. The latter should not be understood as a relativistic conclusion; POs’ behavior was influenced following a systematic pattern associated with the role of the PO as a character in the story. This finding should serve as a basis for future research in the production of a more robust psychological and behavioral theory of noncompliance.

7. Conclusion

This article argues that narrative frames influence POs’ willingness to step into a zone of noncompliance, and that these narrative frames exert a heterogenous effect conditioned by contexts. A series of vignette experiments included in a survey test these two propositions. The survey was conducted in a representative sample of a municipality similar to many others in the Latin American region. In line with the ideas presented here, our results show that the narrative frames employed by people with whom POs engage indeed influence POs’ views of noncompliance as corrupt, their justification of these acts, and their willingness to participate in them.

Key findings were that redistribution and rigidity narrative treatments were effective in lowering the perception of corruptness of actions. Pareto and redistribution treatments were effective in increasing POs’ justification of what seemed to be administrative corruption. POs showed a greater willingness to participate in these corrupt-like actions when the Pareto, the rigidity, and the redistribution treatment narratives were applied. Additionally, consistent with our initial proposition, our findings suggest that the effectiveness of narrative frames depends on the context. In this sense, POs seemed to be willing to participate in the requested favor depending on the role they have to play in the story. In general, POs are willing to become the hero of the story, and therefore accept to participate in the favor only if the victim is a deserving entity, for instance, a citizen rather than a bureaucrat. However, in our results, POs are not willing to participate if the villain is the system. In these situations, according to our findings, even when POs are clear to become the heroes, having the system as the villain made them less willing to participate. With these findings, we contribute to explain noncompliance as a function of the interactions between POs and the other people with whom they interact on a daily basis, be them policy targets or other POs in the organization. The results unveil the relational dimension explored previously in Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000), where policy targets may effectively place POs in a dilemma (Gofen 2015).

In day-to-day interactions, one side produces narrative frames to persuade the other to break the rules. Narrative frames influence POs, making them willing to deviate from rules if they are convinced they are pursuing an alternative and satisfying course of action (B. D. Jones 2002; March and Olsen 2008; Simon 1972). The results place greater emphasis on the intricacies of human psychology concerning POs’ behavior (Grimmelikhuijsen et al. 2017) and contributes to explain noncompliance by challenging the apparent inconsequentiality of POs’ everyday interaction with those who they need to deal with. 

NOTES

1. A third scientific partner selected a sample used by authorities to request respondent participation. Both parties agreed to share and disclose the dataset publicly, withholding names and any other item that may compromise confidentiality.

2. The survey included a 51st department to identify respondents who did not meet the minimum substitution criteria, which were same gender and same tier in the hierarchy. Respondents in the 51st represent 2.1 percent of the sample, accounting for cases where criteria were impossible to meet.

3. The control group is the comparison parameter in the models; it serves as the reference group

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Authors thanks contributions made by participants in the Public Administration Division Seminar 2019 and the IWPP 2018, Pittsburgh. Special thanks to Ana Rojas, Tania Romero, Eduardo Saucedo, Erika García, Veronica Jasso, Liza Fernandez, Luis Vega, and Prof. María del Pilar Fuerte Celis (CentroGeo) and Prof. Alfonso Miranda (CIDE-PANEL) for helping at different stages of the survey production.would like to thank the contributions made by colleagues and students of the public policy program during fieldwork and data collection. 

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In general, participants showed a limited willingness to embrace justificatory frames. However, like the panels in the top row show, within the bounds of the study, redistributive and institutional frames shaped civil servants’ attitudes. In total, framing increases corruption tolerance by between 2 and 3 percentage points, which, given the low levels of tolerance displayed in our study, translates into between 40 and 70% in respondents’ acceptance of corrupt acts. With respect to the use of quid pro quo offers, our results are consistent with a tradeoff hypothesis. While solicitors can strive to persuade public officials by offering enticements, they do so at the risk of making the unethical nature of their request more salient. Despite involving an explicit transgression of the law, a request to misbehave is perceived to be between 3 and 4.6 percentage points less corrupt and more justifiable and between 2 and 3 percentage points less reportable when it does not include an offer. But is this effect independent, or do offers spoil the effect of framing? To explore this question, we specify a model in which we interact both treatments (Table 5).

As Table 4 shows, we found some evidence consistent with the spoiling effect of quid pro quo offers. In general, when solicitors mention an exchange of favors, individuals become alert, and the effect of framing disappears. We found only one instance in which the effect of framing is potentiated by offers. When monetary offers are involved, efficiency frames seem critical for solicitors’ capacity to avoid detection. When they are not, frames seem redundant.   This result suggests that different offers trigger distinct considerations in the minds of individuals. Yet, more research is necessary to understand the varied moderating effects that different types of offers can generate.

Conclusion

Civil servants play a critical role in the emergence and maintenance of, and in the fight against, grand and petty corruption. Unsurprisingly, a small but growing body of literature has examined the forces that lead civil servants to tolerate and justify corruption (Guo & Tu, 2017; Jackson & Smith, 1996; Mancuso, 1993; Peters & Welch, 1978). In this paper, we have sought to contribute to this literature by conceptualizing corruption as an interpersonal phenomenon in which the framing of requests, offers, and exchanges matters. We have argued that frames that emphasize the capacity of bureaucrats to improve social and institutional outcomes through the illegal disregard of the bureaucratic procedure influence the way in which civil servants see corruption. 

To test these ideas, we conducted an original experiment on a representative sample of civil servants working in a large Mexican municipality like many in Latin America. We found civil servants to perceive bureaucratic misbehavior as less corrupt when it was framed to highlight its capacity to redistribute resources, improve institutional efficiency, and increase institutional flexibility. Further, consistent with previous scholarship, we found that pro-institutional frames have a more consistent effect than pro-social frames. Finally, we found that explicit quid pro quo offers contravene a framing strategy. Not only do they clarify bureaucratic misbehavior as corruption, but, in most cases, they spoil the effect of framing. 

Three specific results are noteworthy. First, even though previous studies have found that corrupt public officials tend to rationalize and frame their misbehavior in light of its harmlessness (Gannett & Rector, 2015; Rabl & Kühlmann, 2009), we found no evidence that civil servants themselves are persuaded by these types of frames. This result suggests that corrupt public officials may be unaware of the ineffectiveness of their strategy, that citizens and officials are affected differently by framing, that public officials anticipate that these frames will be used to hide misbehavior, or that civil servants in developed and developing democracies form their ethical evaluations differently. Future studies should compare the effect of frames on citizens and public officials, to explore these possibilities more deeply. 

Second, institutional frames seem to be at least as effective as redistributive frames in obfuscating the link between bureaucratic misbehavior and corruption. This result suggests that, in addition to assessing the ethical nature of their actions, civil servants evaluate the degree to which their behavior is harmful, fair, and just (Dungan et al., 2014; Kahneman et al., 1986) and consider the degree to which it improves the functioning of government. Interventions seeking to instill organizational loyalty among public officials should not lose sight of the capacity of corrupt solicitors to use this value to frame bureaucratic misbehavior. 

The third result to highlight is that, as previous correlational studies have noted (Guo & Tu, 2017; Jackson & Smith, 1996; Peters & Welch, 1978), portraying bureaucratic misbehavior as a favor or economic exchange clarifies these actions as corrupt, unjustifiable, denounceable, and un-endorsable. This finding is important for two reasons. On the one hand, not all acts of corruption involve a direct and explicit monetary exchange. Many involve breaking the law to benefit others without the explicit intention of having the favor returned. To the extent that these types of actions are more likely to pass unnoticed by civil servants, they may become more likely to be normalized and socialized. Interventions to reduce corruption in developing countries would do well to train civil servants to recognize corruption even in the absence of monetary and favor quid pro quo offers. On the other hand, this result is noteworthy because it suggests the existence of a tradeoff between entering into a process of economic bargaining (Atanasov, 2011; Estrada-Gallego, 2009; Shleifer & Vishny, 1993) and a persuasive communication process. It seems that solicitors and corrupt organizations (Arellano Gault, 2017; Pinto et al., 2008) may need to abandon this path as soon as they seek to enter an economic bargaining process. 

While the experimental framework used here allows us to account for important internal validity threats, it is critical to acknowledge that it also has limitations. On the one hand, our study was focused on four specific examples of social and institutional frames. Yet, many other frames (e.g., impunity, social acceptability, confidentiality) may also influence the attitudes of public officials. We hope to inspire others to theorize how other frames may also allow corruption to disseminate and consolidate in bureaucratic organizations. On the other hand, by including justification frames, we have simultaneously introduced additional information that could be novel to some of the study participants. Although we think that it is unlikely that our participants have never heard of the framings introduced here, our empirical strategy cannot disentangle information and framing effects. Future studies should develop a more nuanced empirical strategy to fulfill this objective. 

Despite these limitations, we believe that our results highlight the importance of framing as a fundamental part of the communicative process by which corruption disseminates. It highlights key implications since anti-corruption strategies have long been aimed at fighting impunity, promoting self-restraint, and incentivizing whistleblowing. These strategies assume an organizational environment in which cooperation is clear and well defined. In several contexts, however, recognizing corruption is difficult since civil servants perceive the violation of the bureaucratic procedure for private gain as a normal way of attaining institutional objectives or as a way to sustain the public interest. This study demonstrates that communication frames constitute an important mechanism through which corruption becomes socialized and therefore consolidated. Consequentially, further interventions are needed to train public officials to identify and deal with corruption frames. Some interventions may involve training civil servants to see through frames and justifications. Others may involve socializing the importance of procedure beyond a legalistic duty, reducing red tape and institutional inflexibility, and providing citizens and civil servants with mechanisms to request or offer help within the legal system.

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Endnotes

[1] We understand tolerance for corruption as a continuum that goes from accepting, participating in, and promoting corruption to condemning, combating, and denouncing this behavior.

[2] The retrospective use of frames refers to the case when a person chooses and uses a frame to justify or rationalize an act of corruption once it has been committed.

[3] We included one abstract vignette and one concrete vignette per area.

[4] See online Appendix E for an analysis of the effective number of observations.

[5] We only asked respondents about their willingness to misbehave in concrete vignettes. After the study, the researchers aided the transparency unit of the municipality in its efforts to implement anti-corruption measures.

[6] See online appendix A for the precise wording of the exact question wording.

[7] There is no academic consensus on the appropriateness of holding information constant across frames. While some have designed experiments to isolate framing from information (Berinsky & Kinder, 2006; Tversky & Kahneman, 1981), others have taken a less stringent strategy (Chen & Zhang, 2016; Iyengar, 1996) perhaps due to the fact that accounting for informational differences across frames risks blocking an important mechanism by which media and relational frames exert their effect and, ultimately, introducing post treatment bias (Montgomery et al., 2018).

[8] We used randomization without replacement to reduce the treatment repetition (see online Appendix B).

[9] Replication material can be found at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0XM0MU

[10] The municipal government studied is in one of the five states with the lowest levels of perceived corruption to be the lowest (INEGI, 2020).

[11] We found little difference in the proportion of participants who justify at least one vignette in our sample and the proportion of Mexicans who justify bribes as measured by LAPOP (see online Appendix D).

[12] While we find little evidence of social desirability unbalances across conditions (online Appendix F) we do find that social desirability moderates the effect of framing toward the null hypothesis.

[13] Our results are robust to an ordered logistic specification that relaxes some of OLS’ assumptions about the dependent variable (see online Appendix J).

[14] In these models, individuals who hold their answer constant (strainghtline) do not contribute any information to the estimates. However, we find strainghtlining to be uncorrelated with demographics, and to moderate our effects toward the null hypothesis (online Appendix H). In addition, we found our results to be robust to clustering the standard errors at the individual level (See online Appendix I).

[15] As online Appendix G shows, we have limited statistical power to identify interaction effects, thus, our null findings should be interpreted carefully