Corruption and confidence in Australian political institutions

Abstract

Corruption is inimical to public support for democratic government. This article uses Australian public opinion surveys to clarify the link between corruption and views of political institutions. The results show that citizens' personal experiences of corruption among public officials are negligible, but that three in four believe that there is some corruption among politicians and almost half believe that corruption in Australia is increasing. Perceptions of corruption matter much more than personal experiences of corrupt public officials in shaping confidence in political institutions. For policy-makers, the findings have implications for how corruption is handled, and in the measures that should be put in place to allay the public's fears about the increase in corruption.

腐败妨碍了公众对民主政府的支持。本文使用澳大利亚舆论调查，澄清了腐败与政治体制观的联系。研究显示公民个人对于公职人员腐败的经验可以忽略不计。倒是四分之三的人相信政客中存在某种腐败，几乎近一半人相信腐败在澳大利亚与日俱增。对腐败的认识，比个人对公职人员中腐败的耳闻目见，对于形成对政治体制的信赖要重要得多。对于政策制定者，这些发现有助于他们处理腐败，采取措施缓和公众对于日增的腐败的恐惧。

Keywords:

• corruption
• trust
• government

Notes

1 The ANUpoll was conducted by Ian McAllister and Juliet Pietsch and the fieldwork was carried out by the Social Research Centre, Melbourne. The data are publicly available from the Australian Data Archive (<http://www.ada.edu.au/>). My thanks to Juliet Pietsch and two anonymous referees from this journal for their constructive comments on an earlier draft of the article.

2 The survey is the 2012 ANUpoll, which was a national random sample of the adult population aged 18 years or more conducted by telephone. The fieldwork for the survey was conducted between 20 August and 9 September 2012. The data are publicly available from the Australian Data Archive (<http://www.ada.edu.au>). Full details of the survey can be found in ANUpoll (2013).

3 It is unlikely that a public official would consciously be able to solicit a bribe from someone with low confidence in politics (Clausen, Kraay, and Nyiri 2011: 235).

4 One objection to this definition is that ‘abuse’ is not defined (Rothstein and Teorell 2012).

5 The 2007 survey also had a ‘can't choose’ option, which attracted just 3 per cent of the responses. For comparability with the 2012 survey this option has been excluded from the estimates.

6 The same question wording was used in the 2006 British Social Attitudes Survey (2006) which found that 87 per cent said ‘never’, 6 per cent ‘seldom’, 3 per cent ‘occasionally’ and 1 per cent ‘quite often’. No-one said ‘very often’, and 3 per cent could not answer the question.

7 The respondents who reported occasional or more frequent experience of a bribe were also asked which government body was involved. A total of 18 per cent each mentioned local government and the police, 27 per cent mentioned another government body, and 22 per cent said that they did not know or were unable to say.

8 The sample size in Tasmania (n = 46), the Australia Capital Territory (n = 33) and the Northern Territory (n = 20) are insufficient for separate analysis.

9 These five items were part of a wider battery of questions, covering confidence in the armed forces, the legal system, the media, trade unions, the police, major Australian companies, and banks and financial institutions.

10 See Bean (2005) for a longer perspective, going back for some institutions to 1985. The 2001–12 comparisons are used here as our interest is primarily in the past decade.

11 The fieldwork for the survey was conducted between 20 August and 9 September 2012. In April 2012, the Australian Council of Trade Unions suspended the Health Services Union and the Labor Party suspended Craig Thomson. In May 2012 Fair Work Australia's report into the misuse of funds was tabled in parliament.

12 The five items are all correlated; the reliability coefficient of the five-item scale (Cronbach's alpha) is 0.69. Multivariate analyses using the five items separately did not reveal any significantly different patterns, and for parsimony it was decided to combine them.