Policing corruption or corrupted policing? A study of social norms and corrupt behaviour in the Ghana Police Service

This research explores the relationship between social norms and corruption in the Ghana Police Service. In its analysis of corruption, this research moves away from a strict disciplinary perspective to a more problem oriented approach. Building on insights emerging from politics, sociology and anthropology, this thesis uses a set of analytical tools from social psychology to examine patterns and linkages between informal norms and behaviour of police officers.

Specifically, this thesis identifies a set of descriptive and injunctive norms within and beyond the Ghana Police Service, mapping how these feed into corruption, assessing their normative influence over police officers’ behaviour. The analysis explores how social, cultural and structural settings enable and compound social norms and their relationship with corruption.

This study uses constructivist grounded theory methods to analyse the data collected through 43 in person interviews with 40 research participants, primarily police officers, during extensive fieldwork in Ghana in 2019.

By using constructivist grounded theory methods this research brings in the subjective experience of officers, thus offering an interpretation of why corruption finds fertile ground within the Ghana Police Service.

The focus on the social dimension of corruption allows the analysis to uncover how corruption is understood and lived by police officers, going beyond the basic incentive-based model of instrumental rationality. These findings contribute to the study of corruption, since they circumvent some of the recurrent tensions in corruption analysis between the universalism of rational choice approaches and the relativism of anthropology.

By uncovering the normative, social and contextual drivers of in the Ghana Police Service (GPS), the findings of this thesis provide a detailed picture of the complex interaction between corrupt behaviour in the GPS and social norms. The analytical focus includes the social, structural, individual and material settings in which the interaction between social norms and corruption plays out.

A recurrent theme within this analysis is the distance between the prescribed and the practiced, between formal rules and regulations prescribing behaviour, and informal norms dictating very different practices. By exploring the underlying reasons and drivers of this distance, this thesis pinpoints some of the analytical linkages between the formality of anti-corruption efforts and the informality associated to corruption and its resilience.