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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Behav. Econ.
Sec. Behavioral Microfoundations
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frbhe.2025.1492421
This article is part of the Research Topic Norms: The Informal Rules that Govern our Lives View all articles

Meritocracy or Malfeasance: Violations of Meritocracy Erode Civic Rule Following

Provisionally accepted
Reuben Kline Reuben Kline 1*Fabio Galeotti Fabio Galeotti 2Raimondello Orsini Raimondello Orsini 3
  • 1 Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, United States
  • 2 Université de Lyon, Lyon, Rhône-Alpes, France
  • 3 Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The perceived legitimacy of institutions, along with the voluntary compliance with authority that it undergirds, is crucial for stable governance and economic development. Legitimacy varies greatly across individuals and societies. We introduce a simple model of meritocratic equity-the notion that in a social exchange, individuals should receive greater compensation if their contributions exceed those of others. We argue that violations of meritocratic equity undermine the legitimacy of authority, leading to breaking rules, laws and civic norms-behaviors we refer to as justified malfeasance-in an effort to reduce perceived inequity. Using data from an incentivized laboratory experiment conducted in the United States and Italy and complemented by data from the World Values Survey, we investigate the effect of meritocratic violations on malfeasance. We find convergent evidence that meritocratic inequity explains variation in justified malfeasance across individuals and across countries. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for multiple equilibria in societal levels of malfeasance and voluntary compliance with authority.

    Keywords: Malfeasance, Corruption, meritocracy, Equity theory, Behavioral ethics, Multi-level modeling

    Received: 06 Sep 2024; Accepted: 13 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Kline, Galeotti and Orsini. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Reuben Kline, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, United States

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