The cross-national association between institutional imbalance, national culture, and illegal fishing

Objectives: Extant research has examined various factors as driving illegal fishing at the country level. Prior research, however, lacked a cohesive theoretical framework to explain the prevalence of this practice at the macro level. The current study borrows concepts and measures from Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), namely national culture and the relative strength of economic and non-economic social institutions (i.e., institutional imbalance), to test if this framework can account for illegal fishing.Methods: We used data from 72 countries between 1995 and 2016 and fixed effects regression models to estimate the longitudinal association between institutional imbalance towards economic institutions and illegal fishing. We then estimated how different configurations of national culture (i.e., individualistic, or collectivistic; coop-erative, or competitive) moderate that association.Results: About 36.67% of all fishing in countries and years in our data is illegal. Institutional imbalance has a strong positive average association with the prevalence of illegal fishing. However, while that association is particularly strong in collectivistic countries, it is week to nonexistent in individualistic countries.Conclusions: Most findings are consistent with the predictions of IAT, particularly regarding the institutional components of the theory, as countries which place an excessive emphasis on economic institutions tend to have more illegal fishing. It contradicts the theory, however, that individualism is protective against the deleterious influence of institutional imbalance. We explore this inconsistency in light of the particularities of fishing and discuss possible implications.