Corruption drives the emergence of civil society

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Journal of the Royal Society – Interface
April 6, 2014; 11 (93)
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/current

Corruption drives the emergence of civil society
Sherief Abdallah1,2,3, Rasha Sayed1, Iyad Rahwan4,2, Brad L. LeVeck5, Manuel Cebrian6,7,
Alex Rutherford4,8 and James H. Fowler5

Author Affiliations
1Informatics Department, The British University in Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
2School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
3Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt
4Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
5Political Science Department, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA
6National Information and Communications Technology Australia, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
7Department of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
8United Nations Global Pulse
http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/93/20131044.abstract

Abstract
Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally through social learning, displace all other forms of punishment and lead to stable cooperation. However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized sanctioning is so successful, then why do many highly authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do states with high levels of public good provision tend to rely more on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption influences the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in promoting cooperation breaks down when some actors in the model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, a weaker centralized authority is actually more effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in the presence of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities that rely only on strong centralized institutions. Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized enforcement. These results help to explain why citizen participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.