“The Pure People” versus “the Corrupt Elite”? Political Corruption, Political Trust and the Success of Radical Right Parties in Europe

Abstract

Contrasting “the pure people” with “the corrupt elite” is a prominent rhetorical figure of populist radical right parties and their proponents. However, scholars rarely consider political corruption as an explanatory factor for the electoral success of this party family. This study investigates the role of individual corruption experience in dealing with public officials for radical right party support in 12 European countries. As central argument, we contend that the relationship between corruption experience and voting radical right is essentially mediated by citizens' trust in public officials and political institutions. The empirical results support this argument, showing that exposure to corruption diminishes political trust which in turn leads to a higher propensity to vote for a radical right party. Additionally, we provide insight about country-specific factors that moderate the individual-level relationships. We find that the eroding effect of corruption experience on trust in public officials is less severe in contexts of low institutional quality. Moreover, radical right parties are particularly able to mobilize support from distrusting voters when in opposition.

Notes

1. We conducted the empirical analysis for the Socialistische Partij (SP) of the Netherlands and the German PDS (now Die Linke). According to March and Mudde (2005), both parties are considered as populist socialist parties.

2. Political trust is generally defined as an individual assessment that the political system produces preferred outcomes and will be responsive even if left untended (Miller and Listhaug 1990, 358).

3. A preceding exploratory factor analysis shows that trust in public officials is empirically quite distinct from other items on political trust and can thus be considered as a separate concept. Regarding trust in political institutions, trust in country's parliament, legal system and police constitute a measurement model with a very good fit to the data. An inclusion of indicators related to partisan actors (political parties or politicians) decreases the fit of the measurement model to some extent, but has no impact on the substantive meaning of the findings presented in the Results section.

4. When examining radical right voting, one might either consider all eligible voters in the analysis, that is, including non-voters, or focus on actual voters only. Our study aims to analyze the direct competition between different motivations in actual voting behavior. Therefore, non-voters were excluded from the sample. In doing so, the reference category is slightly smaller, which might increase the statistical power of our test statistics. A re-analysis including non-voters reveals very similar findings.

5. Besides this “passive” corruption indicator, the ESS contains a question whether respondents have offered a bribe themselves within the last five years. Only 1.3% of the respondents reported to have been actively involved in corruption. Since we expect this question to be plagued by social desirability bias, we focus on the role of passive corruption. Again, a re-estimation of the empirical models using a composite indicator of passive and active corruption leads to virtually the same empirical findings.

6. Incorporating alternate indicators of institutional quality (e.g., WGI Government Effectiveness, WGI Control of Corruption or International Country Risk Guide Quality of Government) leads to substantively similar results.

7. In the case of Denmark, the Danish People's Party was not part of the government but provided constant parliamentary support. Considering Denmark as “not in government” does not alter the substantive meaning of the results.

8. The results are not sensitive to this choice. Using a maximum-likelihood estimator with robust standard errors (Huber–White) and a probit link for the radical right vote equation leads to similar results.

9. The reported RMSEA values indicate that our models have a “close fit” to the data (RMSEA < .05; Hu and Bentler 1999). Since included country dummies are additional parameters which explain less variance than a regular explanatory variable, the goodness of fit is comparatively higher (RMSEA < .05; CFI > .95) in models without country fixed effects.

10. The probit model expresses the probability of y given as P(y=1|x)=F(−t+b×x), where y=1 represents voting for a radical right party, b is the raw trust coefficient and t stands for the probit threshold (not reported; see Muthén and Muthén 2012, 492, for details). For the computation of the country-specific probability values, parameters of the dummy variables are included as country-specific intercepts.

11. An analysis of the variance components (intraclass correlations) indicates that about 21% of the variance of radical right voting can be attributed to country differences. In the case of trust in political institutions, 19% of the variance is accounted for by the country level, while for trust in public officials this proportion is about 6%.