CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Karatzoglou, Vasileios |
|---|---|
| Title | Snitches get stitches?: Understanding Greek attitudes towards peer enforcement of laws |
| Summary | Countries are increasingly relying on citizen enforcement to uphold laws where official enforcement channels fail. However, in practice, these citizens often become targets of negative reactions by other people, being branded “snitches”. This is reflected in the antisocial punishment theory, where cooperators and norm enforcers are sometimes the ones being punished. Drawing on Greece, where previous experiments have suggested this phenomenon is significant, I examine how people perceive the decision to report someone breaking a law, in a smoking ban violation or tax evasion. I hypothesize that disapproval will: differ by violation type (H1), decrease as the perceived seriousness of the violation increases (H2), increase when a reward for reporting exists (H3), and increase when other people are perceived to also disapprove (H4). The study employs a 2 x 2 randomized vignette-based survey experiment including 488 Greek respondents recruited online, who were exposed to these two violations, with the presence of a reward varying. The findings show higher disapproval in the case of reporting a smoking ban violation, no effect of reward on disapproval, and disapproval increasing as perceived seriousness falls, and the norm is perceived as more disapproving. This suggests that policies relying on citizen enforcement should address reputation issues rather than provide only rewards. |
| Supervisor | Murugesan, Anand |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/karatzoglou_vasileio.pdf |
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