U.N. Parking Ticket Madness

So, there's a lot going on in the world. War, famine, disease, you name it. So what better distraction than a study about diplomatic parking tickets? I actually found this quite interesting--using delinquent parking tickets at the U.N. as a measure of corruption. The blurb about the study was in The Atlantic (scroll down a ways), I found it on BoingBoing, and apparently you can buy the paper as a .pdf here.

From The Atlantic:

Diplomatic Impunity

What makes officials corrupt? Disentangling law and culture is a tricky business, but a pair of economists have come up with an ingenious way to do it: studying the frequency of parking violations committed by diplomats in New York City. Since, as their study reports, there is “essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations,” the authors hypothesized that any cross-national variation in parking-violation rates should flow from culture alone. And sure enough, diplomats from countries with high levels of corruption were significantly more likely to incur parking tickets, suggesting that cultural factors rather than legal norms drive a great deal of official misconduct. The worst offenders were Kuwaitis, who accumulated an astonishing 246 violations per diplomat per year from the end of 1997 through 2002, followed by Egyptians, with 140 violations per diplomat per year; countries whose diplomats incurred no parking tickets included Canada, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The study also found that officials from countries where the U.S. is less popular were much more likely to park illegally, and that there was a significant drop-off in violations after 9/11, particularly among diplomats from Muslim nations.

Of course, this immediately makes me think of Moscow in '97, when I was living there. Rudy Giuliani started getting tough with the Russian mission to the U.N.--I think he might have even had some of their cars towed. In retaliation, Mayor Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow issued an order to city traffic cops to pull over all cars with plates indicating foreign ownership (that's a lot, trust me).

"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way."