Does corruption suppress voter turnout?^*

* This article is a modified and extended version of a book chapter appearing in “Stepping Stones: Research on Political Representation, Voting Behavior, and Quality of Government” (eds. Dahlberg, Oscarsson, and Wängnerud 2013). The manuscript has been modified and reprinted with the permission of the authors.

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates to what extent voters’ perceptions of political corruption affect turnout. In previous research, two opposing views are put forward with regards to the relationship between corruption and turnout. On the one hand, corruption increases turnout because voters either are bought off to participate or because they are mobilized on clean government issues. On the other hand, corruption decreases turnout because presence of corruption corrodes the political system which leads to general cynicism, distrust and voter apathy. In this paper, we contribute to the existing research by adopting a multi-level approach to the relationship between corruption and turnout. We test the hypothesis that voters’ perceptions of corruption dampens turnout but that the effect is conditional upon the corruption context. We test our hypothesis by combining individual-level data and country-level data from 26 countries from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and country-level data from the Quality of Government Data Set. The findings show that perceiving corruption negatively affects turnout, but only in countries with low to medium levels of system corruption.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Maria Solevid is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Political science at University of Gothenburg. Her research interests are political behavior, political psychology and survey methodology.

Stefan Dahlberg is Associate Professor at the Department of Political science at University of Gothenburg. His research interests are representative democracy, quality of government and survey methodology.

Notes

1. With this article follows an Online Appendix (See supplementary data) including additional analyses, summary statistics and descriptive statistics.

2. “Freedom in the World.” Freedom House’s annual global survey of political rights and civil liberties (www.freedomhouse.org).

3. The data can be sought from CSES Secretariat, www.cses.org, Centre for Political Studies. Institute for Social Research. The University of Michigan. The data can also be downloaded from: www.umich.edu/~cses.

4. Integrated markets cluster: Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zeeland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and USA. Iceland is not included in Johnston 2005.

Elite cartels cluster: Brazil, Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Poland, Portugal, South Korea, Spain.

Oligarchs and clans cluster: Bulgaria, Peru, Mexico, Romania

5. This is however a truth with modification. If subgroup regressions are conducted on these countries, the effect is significantly negative in the Czech Republic and Brazil while it is significantly positive in Italy and Hungary. Among the remaining countries within the more corrupt contexts there is not a significant difference at all. One reason for these deviating results might have to do with the degree of politicization of corruption among parties (see fc. Bågenholm 2013).

6. Further analysis of the interaction effect using average marginal effect with 95% confidence intervals shows that perceptions of corruption does not matter for individual turnout in the objectively most corrupt countries (CPI > 6), see Figure 1 in Appendix 2, See supplementary data. See (Julious 2004) for a discussion about confidence intervals).