Who Grants Favours? A Survey of Public Servants in Greece

• In Event: Clientelism

Abstract

Following Greece’s debt crisis, the EU did not just ask Athens to implement austerity measures, but also anticorruption reforms, to address the root cause of the country’s economic problems. Yet, we know surprisingly little about whether and to what extent efforts to control corruption have compelled behavioural changes among public servants, the primary actors in corrupt behaviour. Public servants are crucial for the delivery of essential services to citizens, and they usually have considerable discretion on how and when to enforce rules. In this paper, we seek to understand how many public servants are involved in the provision of favours within their organization. To this end, we gathered survey data on 500 public servants in eleven Greek regions, and asked them about their willingness to break a rule to help someone in need. To get around the problem of obtaining truthful answers to sensitive questions, we asked both a direct question and embedded a list experiment in the survey. We find that public servants’ willingness to grant favours depends on their partisanship (conservatives are more likely to grant favours), their perception of the criteria upon which promotion decisions are made (performance, seniority, or loyalty), their recruitment (merit-based or not), and their employment status (non-permanent employees are more likely to grant favours than those with job security). Our findings provide a better understanding of the context that motivates Greek public servants to break rules, and yield actionable recommendations to policymakers.

Authors

• Ioannis Choulis, University of Essex

• Alexandra Hennessy, University of Essex