COVID-19, perception of legal compliance, and the rule of law: an analysis using Korea's regional data

Abstract

This paper empirically analyzes the influence of COVID-19 on people's perception of legal compliance and the rule of law using regional panel data in South Korea, showing that COVID-19 might have actually strengthened the rule of law. We construct the Adjusted Legal Compliance Index, which measures the non-arbitrariness of law enforcement and people's perception of legal compliance while controlling for possible bias from macro-scale shocks. Panel data analyses using regional survey data from Statistics Korea show that the cumulative cases of COVID-19 as a percentage of the population have a significantly positive relationship with the legal compliance indices, implying the relevance to classical social contract theories.