Of Parking Tickets And Justice

Two scholars recently published a paper on a topic not often considered: the number of parking violations incurred by United Nations diplomats posted from around the world. The results were embarrassing for many countries, and also fascinating, because during the period the scholars studied, there were no penalties for diplomats who violated New York parking laws. Hence the data might be said to reveal the degree to which people will obey the law even in the absence of punishment.

Diplomats from countries with strong legal systems and low levels of corruption, including Norway, Canada, Sweden and Denmark, incurred no parking tickets despite the total absence of penalties for doing so. Diplomats from countries with high levels of corruption and weak rule of law, by contrast, incurred large numbers of tickets. This continued to be the case even when the results were adjusted to reflect differences in levels of both personal and national income (more corrupt countries also tend to be poorer and have more poorly-paid diplomats).

It seems that in countries with strong legal systems, a respect for the law becomes a “social norm,” to use the phrase preferred by academic researchers. That is to say, people are not simply law-abiding due to fear of punishment, but have so internalised the laws as to have become voluntarily “lawful” and act in a manner that reflects an internal compass, and thus will continue to obey laws even when punishments do not exist.

These factors also correlate strongly with life satisfaction. Perhaps because people living in lawful countries benefit from a shared contribution toward an expectation of justice, countries whose diplomats incurred fewer parking tickets tend to record higher levels of average life satisfaction. By contrast, countries with large numbers of violations, such as Egypt, Bulgaria, and Zimbabwe, tended to have weak legal systems, high levels of corruption, and citizens who report low average levels of satisfaction with their lives.