Anger, Anxiety and Corruption Perceptions: Evidence from France

DOI10.1177/0032321717691294
Published date01 December 2017
AuthorSarah Birch,Nicholas J Allen,Katja Sarmiento-Mirwaldt
Date01 December 2017
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717691294
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(4) 893 –911
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717691294
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Anger, Anxiety and Corruption
Perceptions: Evidence from
France
Sarah Birch,1 Nicholas J Allen2
and Katja Sarmiento-Mirwaldt3
Abstract
This article assesses the roles of anxiety and anger in shaping people’s perceptions of politicians’
integrity. Drawing on recent work on the role of affect in shaping political judgement, the article
develops a theoretical model of the anticipated role of anger and anxiety in structuring reactions
to allegations of political misconduct. The model is tested on a unique data set that includes results
of an experiment fielded as part of a survey carried out in January 2013 among a representative
sample of the French adult population. The analysis finds that those in whom politically dubious
actions generate anxiety are more sensitive to contextual details than other respondents, although
the role of anger in modulating ethical judgements is less clear-cut, dampening attention to
information about negatively assessed behaviour but enhancing attention to information about
behaviour that is assessed more positively.
Keywords
emotions, corruption perceptions, French politics, public ethics
Accepted: 30 November 2016
It has become a truism in the contemporary world that citizens tend to look askance at the
morals of their elected leaders. Whether, as in Lord Acton’s phrase, politics corrupts or
whether people are simply wont to find fault with those who govern them is unclear.
Suffice it to say, the citizens of most modern states have a marked tendency to see their
elected representatives as being susceptible to corruption and misconduct. Yet although
we know that people tend to have a fairly jaundiced view of politics and politicians, we
know far less about why some people are more inclined than others to see their leaders in
a negative light. A better understanding of how people form ethical judgements may hold
1Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, London, UK
2Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK
3Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
Corresponding author:
Sarah Birch, Department of Political Economy, King’s College London, Strand, London WC24 2LS, UK.
Email: Sarah.Birch@kcl.ac.uk
691294PSX0010.1177/0032321717691294Political StudiesBirch et al.
research-article2017
Article
894 Political Studies 65 (4)
one of the keys to improving citizens’ perceptions of elite political conduct. If political
elites are made aware of the processes through which negative evaluations of them are
formed, they may be able to alter their conduct and its communication to citizens so as to
short-circuit such reactions. This could, in turn, reduce disillusionment with politics.
Over the past 30 years or so, research on attitudes towards political ethics has spawned
a growing literature generally referred to under the rubric of ‘corruption perceptions’. We
have gained some insight into the demographic, attitudinal and behavioural correlates of
perceptions of elected representatives’ conduct (Allen and Birch, 2012; Blais et al., 2010;
Davis et al., 2004; Johnston, 1986; Redlawsk and McCann, 2005) as well as the role of
framing in shaping the ethical judgements people make about those who govern them
(Chanley et al., 1994; Gonzalez et al., 1995). Yet a very large proportion of the variation
in corruption perceptions remains unexplained in existing studies, which suggests that
there are factors at play which have not yet been identified by scholars working in this
field. We suggest that one such factor is affect, and that drawing on insights from the
political psychology of emotions will enable us better to explain how ethical evaluations
of politicians are formed.
The importance of emotions in shaping people’s attitudes to politics has played an
integral part in the philosophy of moral reasoning since at least the time of David Hume.
More recently, the role of affect in political evaluations has received considerable atten-
tion from social and political psychologists (e.g. Arceneaux, 2012; Brader et al., 2008;
Ladd and Lenz, 2008, 2011; Marcus, 2002, 2003; Marcus et al., 2000, 2011; MacKuen
et al., 2010; Masters, 2001; Masters and Sullivan, 1989; Nadeau et al., 1995; Redlawsk,
2006; Sears, 2001). Yet this attention still has to penetrate corruption perceptions research
to any great degree: this field has to date been largely inductive and has generally lacked
a strong grounding in psychological theories of judgement. This article seeks to go some
way towards remedying this lacuna by probing the role of affect in structuring percep-
tions of political leaders’ integrity.
Our starting point is Pippa Norris’ (1999, 2011) idea that ‘critical citizens’ who are
disenchanted with the actions of their leaders can be functional for democracy in providing
feedback and input into the political process. Following Michael MacKuen et al. (2010),
we argue that, due to the confounding effects of emotions, not all those who are disaffected
with politicians exhibit the same cognitive orientations that the ‘critical citizens’ thesis
predicts. We suggest that affective reactions to politicians condition the extent to which
negative evaluations of political behaviour make people more critical of politicians. We
argue that these cognitive processes condition corruption perceptions and that the role of
affect in shaping corruption perceptions fills an important gap in our understanding of why
some people are more likely than others to perceive politicians as corrupt.
We posit that affect matters for the way people assimilate and process information
about political situations. Specifically, anxiety can be expected to make people pay closer
attention to information about specific instances of corruption and make more nuanced
judgements, while anger leads them to rely more on stereotypes and is likely to be associ-
ated instead with blanket condemnations of political actors. We test this supposition on
data collected as part of a January 2013 sample survey of the population in France. Most
previous research on ‘affect effects’ has been carried out on US data, but the United States
is in many ways an unusual democracy: parties are weak and regionally fragmented, and
personal vote cultivation is common. France is arguably more typical of established
democracies; it is a party-based unitary system with a hybrid executive type and parlia-
mentary government. Like many other democracies, France has witnessed a marked

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