Civil Servants' Compliance with Conflict‐of‐Interest Regulation: Evidence from a List Experiment

ABSTRACT While regulatory governance scholarship has paid significant attention to the normative importance of ethics reform in government, empirical evidence on compliance remains scant. Drawing on insights from the social value activation model and behavioral ethics, this study examines civil servants' compliance propensity under conflict‐of‐interest regulation. Specifically, we examine how a legitimate ethics reform is associated with the voluntary compliance of two legally treated groups: those with policy implementation duties and those with frequent stakeholder engagement. The results of our list experiment with a representative sample of South Korean civil servants ( n = 1977) show that both target groups exhibit higher estimated compliance propensity with the second provision of the Act, restricted and prohibited actions, but that only policy implementation duties are associated with higher compliance propensity with the first provision, reporting and disclosure obligations. Our findings suggest that ethics reform compliance is shaped not only by formal rules and deterrence, but also by administrative role exposure, perceived legitimacy, and the value‐based dimension of civil servants.