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Record W4406079739 · doi:10.1111/ajps.12940

Can norm‐based information campaigns reduce corruption?

2025· article· en· W4406079739 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueAmerican Journal of Political Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCorruption and Economic Development
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNorm (philosophy)Language changePolitical scienceComputer securityBusinessComputer scienceInternet privacyLaw

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract Can norm‐based information campaigns reduce corruption? Such campaigns use messaging about how people typically behave (descriptive norms) or ought to behave (injunctive norms). Drawing on survey and lab experiments in Ukraine, we unpack and evaluate the distinct effects of these two types of social norms. Four findings emerge: First, injunctive‐norm messaging produces consistent but relatively small and temporary effects. These may serve as moderately effective, low‐cost anti‐corruption tools but are unlikely to inspire large‐scale norm transformations. Second, contrary to recent studies, we find no evidence that either type of norm‐based messaging “backfires” by inadvertently encouraging corruption. Third, descriptive‐norm messages emphasizing corruption's decline produce relatively large and long‐lasting effects—but only among subjects who find messages credible. Fourth, both types of norm‐based messaging have a substantially larger effect on younger citizens. These findings have broader implications for messaging campaigns, especially those targeting social problems that, like corruption, require mitigation of collective action dilemmas.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.814
Threshold uncertainty score0.824

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.002
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.015
GPT teacher head0.336
Teacher spread0.320 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it