‘They Accept Bribes; We Accept Bribery’: Conditional Effects of Corrupt Encounters on the Evaluation of Public Institutions

Abstract The conventional view of corruption emphasizes its detrimental impact on the evaluations public institutions. This implies that in corruption-intense environments, should exert strong pressure relevant authorities to combat corruption. Yet, multiple historical accounts suggest such contexts, tends thrive even despite extensive state-imposed anti-corruption measures. In this letter, we address puzzle by studying context-dependent effects individual experiences petty corrupt exchanges popular evaluation Drawing literature functionality informal and normalization corruption, posit negative will be attenuated presence institutional among service providers. contexts permeated become routine, with limited effect citizens' perceptions street-level bureaucracy. Our empirical test, relying a unique cross-national survey dataset from Central-Eastern Europe fine-grained ecological (municipality-level) indicator largely supports these conjectures.