Bribery and other forms of petty corruption typically arise in bureaucratic encounters and are a common element of the everyday experience of the state in many countries, particularly in places with weak institutions. This type of corruption is especially troublesome because it creates direct costs for citizens when accessing services and benefits to which they are formally entitled. However, only a few studies deal with how situational attributes of bureaucratic interactions create incentives for citizens to pay bribes and opportunities for street-level bureaucrats to demand them. We contribute to filling this gap by providing evidence that administrative burdens increase the chance of bribery. We do so by analyzing the prevalence of (attempted) bribery in more than 63,000 interactions across 20 different types of bureaucratic encounters, ranging from paying taxes to accessing essential services, using multilevel logistic regression analysis. Our study contributes to understanding the possible consequences of administrative burdens and the factors conducive to petty corruption in specific citizen-state interactions.

中文翻译：

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负担、贿赂和官僚：小腐败和行政负担的政治经济学

贿赂和其他形式的小规模腐败通常出现在官僚交往中，是许多国家国家日常经历的常见因素，特别是在机构薄弱的地方。这种类型的腐败特别麻烦，因为它给公民在获得正式有权享受的服务和福利时造成了直接成本。然而，只有少数研究涉及官僚互动的情境属性如何激励公民行贿以及如何为街头官僚提出索要贿赂的机会。我们通过提供行政负担增加贿赂机会的证据来帮助填补这一空白。为此，我们使用多级逻辑回归分析，分析了 20 种不同类型的官僚机构中 63,000 多次互动中（从纳税到获得基本服务）贿赂的普遍程度。我们的研究有助于理解行政负担可能产生的后果以及在特定的公民与国家互动中有利于小腐败的因素。