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ABSTRACT
If alleged corruption helps populists get elected, as extant research suggests, do they later address the problem effectively? This study seeks systematic cross-national evidence for the link between populist parties in government and malfeasance by analysing evidence from Eastern Europe. The central argument is that once in power, populist parties fail to eliminate corruption because (i) they also resort to clientelistic practices to secure re-election, and (ii) they weaken the mechanisms of accountability. The results from regression analysis of panel data and qualitative case studies confirm that ruling populist parties have not been successful in fighting corruption mostly because of their deliberate encroaching on state institutions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Offe (Citation2004, 77) offers a list of practices, broadly perceived as wrongdoings that are “neighboring” the domain of political corruption: fraud, embezzlement, theft, nepotism, cronyism, gifts, donations, lobbying, and other.
2 For particular examples of such definitions in the legislation of some post-Communist states, see Kostadinova (Citation2012, 7).
3 Van Kessel’s identification of populist post-Communist parties was used in previous research on the link between government quality and voter behaviour in Europe (Agerberg Citation2017).
4 Populist parties may or may not be single-issue oriented. Some of them run on an exclusively anti-corruption campaign, while other along with fighting corruption, promise better social provisions or defense of national traditions and pride. While such ideological variation may exist, for reasons of parsimony I keep the theoretical argument simple and build on the assumption that the anti-corruption issue is at the centre of all populists’ platforms, and it was the main reason for their election in a number of East European states.
5 There are traces of the anti-corruption narrative in the programmes of non-populist parties as well, which are often intertwined in a “good-governance” framework (Engler Citation2020).
6 A full model of the corruption-populism nexus would have to account for a reciprocal relationship between corruption and populists in government since populist parties have clearly benefitted electorally from voter perceptions of corruption. However, this project focuses on the consequences from elected populists for anti-corruption outcomes. To ensure causal time sequence, I use lagged variables in the estimation of the paths in .
7 Parties were coded in the analysis as populist if classifications in at least two of the following sources had identified them as such: Populist Parties in Europe (Van Kessel Citation2015), The PopuList (Rooduijn et al. Citation2019), and State of Populism in Europe (Boros et al. Citation2020).
8 The parties listed in the Appendix include both centrist- and more radical-populist parties. The latter, examples of which are Ataka in Bulgaria, Jobbik in Hungary, and Self Defense in Poland, have won parliamentary representation and some of them (Ataka) even served as a junior partner in a GERB-led governing coalition.
9 The WBI operational definition includes “both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as ‘capture’ of the state by elites and private interests” (https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/pdf/cc.pdf). Thus, it provides information on the corruptiveness of the entire political system.
10 To address some of the problems identified with perception-based indexes and check the robustness of the results, additional tests were run with other indices of corruption. On all corruption measures, Slovenia scores as the least corrupt over the period under investigation, and the scores for most corrupt were given to Croatia in the late 1990s. The biggest change in the corruption climate (toward worsening) in a single country is registered for Hungary.
11 The sources used to compile this index include information about freedom of the press, but also accountability of public officials, electoral integrity, transparency of government policy making, and constitutionality in the operation of the representative institutions (https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/pdf/va.pdf).
12 To account for economic inequality (Uslaner Citation2008), I also added GINI, and re-ran the tests. Such an effect was not confirmed by the data, and the main results remained unchanged.
13 USAID 2016 CSO Sustainability Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia, 2nd edition, July 2017. Available at https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/documents/1866/CSOSI_EE_2017_Regional_Report_FINAL_2.pdf, accessed 17 December 2018.
14 This technique would help correct the standard errors produced by OLS with regard to two problems, groupwise heteroskedasticity and contemporaneous correlation.
15 The addition of a lagged dependent variable (LDV) on the right-hand side is not without a cost, especially in LSDV models (Allison Citation2009, 96; Wilson and Butler Citation2007). I also estimate the two equations with a fixed-effects model (xtreg in STATA) with no LDV but clustered by country errors, that produced estimates consistent with the rest of the analysis in this study.
16 Using sem, I obtained no support for a direct effect of populists in government on corruption, but strong evidence for their negative effect on institutional accountability and indirectly on corruption.
17 A direct effect cannot be assessed with a reasonable precision from these data due to lack of stable empirical parameters of such influence.
18 In the Sobel method, the indirect effect is calculated as the product of the coefficients for the impact of the treatment on the mediator and the mediator on the outcome variable.
19 The essence of this estimation is the “simulating of predicted values of the mediator or outcome variable, which we do not observe, and then calculating” average causal mediation quantities (Hicks and Tingley Citation2011).
20 This combination of large-N with small-N methods is within the “nested analysis” framework discussed by Lieberman (Citation2005). By investigating what happened within (rather than across) cases, I seek to find specific and detailed pieces of evidence for ruling populists’ behaviour that verify intermediate steps leading to the proposed outcome.
21 The PiS was extremely harsh toward the highest judges, undermining their prestige by publicly comparing them to “Iranian ayatollahs” (Schenkkan Citation2017).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tatiana Kostadinova
Tatiana Kostadinova is professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University. Her research interests include elections, political parties, corruption, and voting behavior. She is the author of Political Corruption in Eastern Europe: Politics After Communism (Lynne Rienner, 2012). Her work has also appeared in various academic journals.