royalsocietypublishing | Centralized sanctioning institutions have been shown to emerge naturally
through social learning, displace all other forms
of punishment and lead to stable cooperation.
However, this result provokes a number of questions. If centralized
sanctioning
is so successful, then why do many highly
authoritarian states suffer from low levels of cooperation? Why do
states with high
levels of public good provision tend to rely more
on citizen-driven peer punishment? Here, we consider how corruption
influences
the evolution of cooperation and punishment. Our
model shows that the effectiveness of centralized punishment in
promoting
cooperation breaks down when some actors in the
model are allowed to bribe centralized authorities. Counterintuitively, a
weaker centralized authority is actually more
effective because it allows peer punishment to restore cooperation in
the presence
of corruption. Our results provide an evolutionary
rationale for why public goods provision rarely flourishes in polities
that rely only on strong centralized institutions.
Instead, cooperation requires both decentralized and centralized
enforcement.
These results help to explain why citizen
participation is a fundamental necessity for policing the commons.
