When Do People Obey Laws? by Shubhangi Roy

Author:Shubhangi Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783031530555
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland

One condition under which legal expression, in and of itself, creates the perception that others approve of the legally prescribed behavior is when legal compliance is seen as socially desirable within the society, i.e., citizen identity is a prominent one. A good contrast to law’s inability to create change through expression in the foot-binding issue comes from present-day South Korea where the government passed the “Improper Solicitation and Graft Act” in 2015. The aim was to combat the norm of people offering expensive gifts and cash to government officials (such as police officers and bureaucrats) as well some private persons (such as teachers and journalists). It provides limits on the value of gifts certain people, or their spouses can receive, and value of restaurant meals they can be offered, etc. Prior to the legislation being enacted, these costs added up considerably. Parents, for example, are known to have bought expensive gifts such as Hermes scarves for their children’s teacher. Businesses had to take their clients to expensive restaurants. Employees felt the social pressure to participate in expensive activities in the evenings. More importantly, failure to meet these expectations had social costs (Suzuki, 2017).11 A year after implementation, 82% of teachers and 73% of parents in a survey reported that inappropriate requests and expectations of gifts disappeared from schools (Suzuki, 2017). Similarly, 3 out of 4 companies reported a drop in their expenses on client relationships (Korean Herald, 2017). Expensive restaurants in office districts saw a drop in visits from employees over lunches since many of them now opted for less expensive options (Suzuki, 2017).

Choi and Storr argue that this ability of law to change a long-standing gift-giving tradition highlights two things. First, individuals were unhappy with the custom and only relied on it to maintain social connections (Choi & Storr, 2019). Once a law was passed in a society where laws are an attractive source of information on socially acceptable behavior, it was utilized by those who were weakly identifying with the old norm (i.e., merely out of fear of social pressure) to abandon the behavior. Second, everyone involved (those unhappy with the older custom and even the ones who enjoyed it) had a strong citizen identity and, therefore, those abandoning the custom in favor of legal compliance were not worried about any social repercussions.

This case study is a good illustration of the discontinuous informational effects of laws extended by McAdams (2015 at pp. 148–151. He suggested that widespread compliance with certain norms can make us believe that there is widespread consensus about the behavior while, in reality, many (or at least an adequate number) people following the customary norms are only doing it to avoid social sanctions (McAdams, 2015). A new law can embolden this category of people, in his explanation, to abandon the customary practice and even enforce the new law by calling out non-compliers. The common example used to illustrate this situation is how non-smokers (who were always inconvenienced by cigarette fumes and smells) could actively voice

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