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Public sector culture does not increase honest behavior: evidence from RCTs in five countries

Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan et al.

Behavioural Public Policy2026https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2026.10032article
AJG 1
Weight
0.50

What the paper says

Honest behavior of public sector workers is an important quality of governance, impacting the functioning of government institutions, the level of corruption, economic development and public trust. Scholars often assume that honesty is inherent to public sector culture, however empirical evidence on the causal effect of public sector culture on honest behavior is lacking. This research addresses this question by estimating the causal effect of priming public sector identity on the honest behavior of public employees. We validated an instrument for priming public sector identity and employed it in five preregistered incentivized experiments among civil servants in Germany, Israel, Italy, Sweden, and the UK ( N = 2,827). We find no evidence for the effect of public sector culture on honest behavior in both individual (four studies) and collaborative (one study) tasks. The theoretical implications of these results for the study of moral behavior in the public sector are discussed.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2026.10032

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@article{raanan2026,
  title        = {{Public sector culture does not increase honest behavior: evidence from RCTs in five countries}},
  author       = {Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan et al.},
  journal      = {Behavioural Public Policy},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2026.10032},
}

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Public sector culture does not increase honest behavior: evidence from RCTs in five countries

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Evidence weight

0.50

Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40

F · citation impact0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20
M · momentum0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07
V · venue signal0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03
R · text relevance †0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20

† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.