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Abstract
More than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the electoral volatility in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is still remarkably high. A considerable part of the volatility derives from the votes for new political parties, since they are very often on the winning side of elections. This article examines corruption as a potential determinant of their electoral support. It argues that the effect of corruption is twofold: on the one hand, the historically derived corruption level reduces the electoral support for new political parties due to strong clientelist structures that bind the electorate to the established parties. On the other hand, an increase in perceived corruption above the traditional corruption level leads to a loss of trust in the political elite and therefore boosts the electoral support for new competitors. A statistical analysis of all democratic elections in CEE between 1996 and 2013 confirms these two counteracting effects.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Klaus Armingeon, Julian Bernauer, Anna Fill, Lindsay Tello, David Weisstanner and two anonymous reviewers for their support and helpful suggestions. I am also very grateful to the participants of the 2014 ECPR Summer School on Political Parties in Lüneburg, including Ferdinand Müller-Rommel and Fernando Casal Bértoa, and the participants of the workshop ‘The Intricacies of Accountability: Horizontal, Vertical and Diagonal Mechanisms to Combat Corruption’ at the 2015 ECPR Joint Sessions in Warsaw for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Corruption is defined as ‘misuse of public power for private gain’ (Rose-Ackerman Citation1999: 91).
2. Bågenholm and Charron (Citation2014) provide a list of all parties politicising corruption in 32 European countries between 1981 and 2011.
3. The only exceptions are parties that are the result of a major party’s merger with one or several insignificant parties.
4. The share of votes in the national parliamentary (i.e. lower house, if bicameral) election is considered. Powell and Tucker (Citation2014: 7) argue that choosing the threshold of 2 per cent ensures equal standards for reporting election data across countries, since parties below that threshold are often subsumed under the category ‘others’. Due to the 2 per cent threshold, not only genuinely new parties but also previously minor parties (< 2 per cent) are coded as new. Usually, this has only a minor impact on the dependent variable, since such parties have won very little more. In addition, just like new parties, very minor parties cannot yet be counted as part of the political establishment. Theoretically, the consequences of corruption for such ‘outsiders’ can therefore be predicted to be very similar.
5. According to this rule, neither the Viktor Yushchenko Bloc ‘Our Ukraine’ nor the Yulia Tymoshenko election bloc – both running in the parliamentary elections in 2002 for the first time – should be coded as new, because both blocs included some minor parties that had won seats previously. However, the leader of both blocs had been Viktor Yushchenko (not affiliated to any party at that time) and Tymoshenko (leader of the main party of the electoral bloc, founded only in 1999), respectively. Due to the high degree of personalisation of Ukrainian politics and the importance of the party’s leadership, I decided to code them as new. However, all analyses have also been calculated with a value for Ukraine 2002 not including these two parties (i.e. Ukraine 2002: 4.1 per cent). The results do not change.
6. The majority of the second democratic elections are excluded from the analysis, since data on corruption is not available for this period of time. Elections that are included in the analysis and labelled as second democratic elections in Figure are the second election with a polity IV score higher than 6. They are not, however, the first democratic elections with a less stringent definition of democracy. Lithuania 1996, Moldova 1998, Ukraine 1998 as well as Macedonia 1998 and Slovenia 1996 are the second elections since independence, but all these countries had more or less free and fair elections in 1990. Their characteristic as second elections might still have an additional impact on the share of votes of new parties (in particular, the dissolution of Sajūdis in Lithuania and the formation of a new communist party in Moldova). All analyses presented in the article are therefore also calculated without these elections. The results do not change.
7. Only Mainwaring et al. (Citation2009) incorporated corruption in their model. They found a significant positive relationship. However, this result has to be interpreted with caution, because Mainwaring et al.’s (Citation2009) worldwide sample includes not only developing but also developed democracies. The latter have both more stable party systems and lower corruption levels than developing democracies. Whether corruption also explains the differences within developing democracies (e.g. CEE countries) has therefore not yet been answered.
8. Because of its clandestine nature, the actual corruption level is not automatically the perceived corruption level. Citizens can only be responsive to the latter. For the empirical analysis, an indicator for perceived corruption is used.
9. The corruption level of the previous year accounts for more than 95 per cent of the variance in corruption level.
10. Data derives from the Control of Corruption Index which is part of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) provided by the World Bank.
11. Clientelism is defined as ‘the trade of votes and other types of partisan support in exchange for public decisions with divisible benefits’ (Piattoni Citation2001: 4).
12. ‘Report on the misuse of state resources and public authorities in the 2012 parliamentary election campaign’, http://www.mans.co.me/en/about-mans/publications/#sthash.gQSfIQpT.dpuf (accessed 15 May 2015). MANS is a local partner of Transparency International.
13. For a deeper discussion see Holmes (Citation2006: 28).
14. The country-specific corruption level and the measure on clientelism by Kitschelt (Citation2013) correlate with r = 0.58 (significant at the p ≤ 0.05 level). The main discrepancy derives from Hungary being a country with relatively low corruption (although increasing over time) but high clientelism.
15. An election is included if the country’s democracy score in the Polity IV Project is 6 or higher. The only exception is Georgia 2008 where elections had been held during the rising conflict over the secession of the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (see e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7411857.stm, accessed 18 June 2014).
16. I use log (total share of votes +1), since the distribution of the y-values is highly right-skewed.
17. Since the CPDS II has not been updated since 2008, I updated the dataset based on the European Election Database by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD) and the dataset Parties and Elections by Wolfram Nordsieck (http://parties-and-elections.eu/).
18. Another reliable data source is the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) by Transparency International (Tavits Citation2007). However, Transparency International itself states that the index should not be used for comparisons over time (http://www.transparency.org/cpi2011/in_detail#myAnchor6, accessed 18 June 2014). It should thus not be used in a cross-national time-series analysis. Nevertheless, the correlation coefficient between the CPI and the WGI is r = 0.92.
19. No country in the sample uses the pure majority rule.
20. Due to a highly right-skewed distribution and following others (see e.g. Andrews and Bairett Citation2014; Powell and Tucker Citation2014) I include the log of the average district magnitude.
21. No country in the sample has a pure presidential system.
22. The number of observations of a model that includes all control variables (e.g. also log_district and the electoral threshold) and DEVretro is too small to have meaningful results (N = 49). However, excluding all non-significant variables (in order to increase the degrees of freedom) and including log_district and the electoral threshold does not change any substantial results.
23. Additional calculation with a short-term perspective – i.e. measuring the difference in the corruption level from one election to another or the difference between the average score of two subsequent legislative periods – have been conducted. None of these indicators have shown a significant effect. This confirms the theoretical assumption that voters include long-term developments in their evaluation of corruption performance. This is also confirmed when including a simple trend dummy (1 positive trend; 0 negative) in the model. It shows that new political parties have won more votes in countries where the general development of corruption over time is positive. However, this does not denote that the trend over time is the only driver of the positive effect of DEVmean and DEVretro: having excluded all countries with a positive trend, these variables still have a significant positive effect. One can conclude that whether corruption is higher or lower matters; but only under consideration of the general state of corruption that changes the meaning of up- and downturns between the different countries at different points in time.
24. Since the correlation between the country-specific corruption level and the Polity IV-score is r = –0.65 the insignificant coefficient of the latter could be a result of multicollinearity. However, excluding the country-specific corruption level does not change the result – the coefficient remains insignificant.
25. In Model 8 the effect is significant one-sided at the 0.1 level.