The paper aims at answering a crucial question of all legal or governmental systems: Why people obey the law? On a very abstract level there may be two explanations, reflecting assumptions regarding human nature. (March & Olsen, 2004) According to the ‘rational actor’ view people calculate the benefits of breaking the law and the expected value of possible sanctions and only if the latter is higher than the former will they follow the law. According to the ‘social actor’ view people basically follow – largely unconsciously – social norms. However, legal and moral norms may collide. What happens in that case? How should we interpret the moral norm: “Laws must always be obeyed”, which, according to Max Weber, is the basis of modern law, work? These questions have been inducing scholarly debates for long. More recently Tom R. Tyler’s theory (Tyler, 2006) seems to dominate this academic field. Tyler states that the procedural justice of law enforcement, as perceived by the affected parties, is the key factor of law-abiding behavior. It is the fairness of procedures and not the sanction that effects behavior. Sanction may even appear as an unfair official action that alienates the community from law enforcing authorities, thus decreasing trust and increasing the occurrence of law-breaking behavior.
Everyday experience as well as research findings challenge this theory in Hungary, a post-communist, Central-East European country. Seemingly, sanction plays a crucial role. In a representative survey administered by the author respondents named the possible sanction as the most relevant element preventing them from breaking the law. In a case study on a newly adopted law respondents reacted similarly. This and several other findings prove that sanctions are important deterrents in this environment, which seems to question Tyler’s result. An in depth analysis, however, reveals that sanctions, in this legal-cultural environment, may play a different role than in the US. Law-breaking behavior typically remains unpunished in Hungary. Thus, sanctions, if applied, reinforce morally-driven law-abiding behavior in a largely anomic society, where norms are blurred and volatile and where frequently norm-driven behavior is considered as an indication of irrational behavior or even foolishness. Sanctions are crucial not so much to the prevent rational actors (in fact a small minority in a society) from breaking the law but rather to assure the majority of norm driven people that law-abiding behavior is normal, they are not idiots. (Kagan, Gunningham, & Thornton, 2011) In this arrangement sanction may be a key for perceived procedural fairness.
References:
Kagan, R. A., Gunningham, N., & Thornton, D. (2011). Fear, duty, and regulatory compliance: lessons from three research projects. In C. Parker & V. L. Nielsen (Eds.), Explaining compliance: Business responses to regulation. Edward Elgar Publishing.
March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (2004). The logic of appropriateness. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Johan_Olsen3/publication/5014575_The_Logic_of_Appropriateness/links/55d2f0c808aec1b0429f03e4.pdf
Tyler, T. R. (2006). Why people obey the law. Princeton University Press.
