What corruption is most harmful? Unbundling citizen perceptions

To combat corruption, many countries employ information campaigns aimed at citizens. When designing such campaigns, practitioners often consider citizen perceptions of corruption’s harms, but typically lack data about two key questions: Which forms of corruption do citizens deem especially pernicious? And how do citizens’ perceptions differ when considering distinct types of harms? This article introduces a diagnostic approach to investigate these questions, drawing on a conjoint experiment conducted in collaboration with Armenia’s Corruption Prevention Commission. This approach maps citizen perceptions of corruption’s consequences across four distinct types of harms: economic, political, moral, and personal. It not only identifies forms of corruption viewed as particularly damaging, but also reveals how findings may diverge across harms. For example, our findings suggest that Armenians perceive high-level embezzlement as especially harmful for all four types of harms we examined. By contrast, they deem healthcare corruption to inflict more personal and moral harm — but less economic and political harm — than corruption in other sectors. While citizens’ perceptions of corruption harms are context specific, our approach has broad applicability both for practitioners designing campaigns, and for scholars seeking to conceptualize corruption and its consequences.