Compliance and accountability-seeking: Evidence from a field experiment in Argentina
中文摘要
履行成本较低的公民义务是否会增强公民寻求问责的行为？我们通过在布宜诺斯艾利斯的火车站开展一项田野实验来回答这一问题。我们通过以下方式使乘客遵守公共交通付费规定的行为产生外生变异：（i）强调违规处罚；（ii）诉诸社会规范，即90%的乘客都会购票。我们发现，处罚处理和规范处理均提高了守规率。然而，只有诉诸社会规范才使接受处理的乘客更愿意签署一份要求提供高质量公共交通服务的请愿书——这是我们衡量问责诉求行为的指标。为探究解释这些结果的机制，我们表明，由遵循规范所引发的守规行为使受试者感到自己更有权要求问责，并在更大程度上信任政府。因此，我们的研究结果表明，通过诉诸社会规范来提高守规率可能会为公民行为带来更广泛的益处。
Abstract
Does compliance with low-cost civic duties increase accountability-seeking behaviors among citizenry? We address this question by conducting a field experiment at train stations in Buenos Aires. We create exogenous variation in compliance with paying the public transportation fare by: (i) highlighting sanctions for non-compliance and ii) appealing to social norms whereby 90% passengers pay the ticket. We find that both sanctions and norms treatments raise compliance. However, only appeals to social norms make treated passengers more willing to sign a petition demanding quality public transportation service—our measure of accountability-seeking behavior. To probe the mechanisms explaining these patterns, we show that compliance invoked by adherence to norms makes subjects feel more entitled to demand accountability and trust the government to a greater extent. Our findings suggest that raising compliance through appeals to social norms may thus have wider benefits for civic behaviors.