Yakuza

• We’ve found that organised crime can undermine the civic honesty of ordinary, law abiding people.
• Civic honesty means adhering to shared moral norms that characterise actions such as tax evasion, bribery or welfare fraud as unacceptable.
• We wanted to explore if the presence of organised crime was a factor in this variability.

83 countries

• To test this, we used an index of global organised cime to rate the influence of criminal groups in different countries and regions on a scale of 1 to 10.
• We paired this index with survey data from more than 128,000 people in 83 countries from two large-scale research studies investigating beliefs, opinions and values.
• Data for these two measures were available from eight African countries, 13 countries in the Americas, 26 Asian nations, 34 European nations and two in Oceania.

Corruption undermines civic honesty

• We found that citizens tended to be less inclined towards civic honesty in countries where organised criminal groups were more widespread.
• Therefore, how much people trust institutions should be linked to their civic honesty.
• In countries such as Italy, Mexico and Russia, the association between civic honesty and political trust was weaker or even non-existent.
• Knowing how much trust a person has in institutions therefore tells you little or nothing about what they think about civic honesty.

Total takeover

• If people had a greater trust in public institutions, they were more likely to show a lower level of civic honesty.
• This seemingly paradoxical outcome could be attributed to criminal groups successfully co-opting the state, thereby subverting the nature and moral responsibilities of institutions.

Crime as a democratic issue

• Organised criminal groups can play a part in altering societal norms by undermining the moral authority of public bodies.
• An insidious erosion of the social contract can follow, shifting norms away from the principles of civic honesty.
• The unchecked growth of organised crime doesn’t merely lead to more illegal activities and lower public security, it threatens the very fabric of our democracies.