Does Institutional Quality Moderate the Relationship between Corruption and Subjective Well-Being?

Using nationally representative data on over 300,000 individuals from 128 countries from the Gallup World Poll for the period between 2005 and 2013, we examine the moderating effect of institutional quality on the association between perceived corruption and subjective well-being. As institutional quality improves, the negative relationship between perceived corruption and an individual's subjective well-being increases on average. We explain this result with the increased personal costs and likelihood of being caught perpetrating corrupt deeds, the heightened perceptions of corruption due to better access to information, the heavy stigma imposed by corruption in societies valuing fairness, and the association of corruption with moral failure.