Crook!: The impact of perceived corruption on non-electoral forms of political behaviour
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512119881710 |
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512119881710
International Political Science Review
2021, Vol. 42(2) 245 –260
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512119881710
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Crook!: The impact of perceived
corruption on non-electoral forms
of political behaviour
Raffaele Bazurli
Martín Portos
Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, Italy
Abstract
Anti-corruption claims have been at the core of many mass mobilizations worldwide. However, the nexus
between corruption and collective action is often overlooked. Bridging social movement and corruption
studies, this article contends that believing in extensive corruption has a positive impact on non-electoral
forms of participation. But this effect is uneven across the population and contingent upon the individual’s
political interest and education. Using survey data from 34 countries, the analysis confirms that people
prefer non-electoral mobilization when institutions are seemingly captured by vested interests. Moreover,
perceiving endemic corruption is likely to breed indignation among lesser-educated and less politically
interested citizens, who are keener to embrace anti-elitist arguments and ultimately engage in extra-
institutional behaviour. These findings help refine theories of societal accountability, which generally assume
that politically sophisticated citizens are the driving force in the fight against corruption.
Keywords
Non-electoral political participation, political behaviour, corruption, societal accountability, comparative
politics
Introduction
The promise of moral redemption lies at the core of collective action aimed at social change. Not
by chance, the revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre was nicknamed ‘The Incorruptible’.
Self-serving, greedy public officials are often the targets of major protest events and anti-corrup-
tion campaigns. In the context of late neoliberalism, social movements have expanded the notion
Corresponding author:
Raffaele Bazurli, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Piazza degli Strozzi, 1, Florence,
50123, Italy.
Email: raffaele.bazurli@sns.it
881710IPS0010.1177/0192512119881710International Political Science ReviewBazurli and Portos
research-article2019
Article
246 International Political Science Review 42(2)
of corruption, framing it as a broader crisis of democratic legitimacy due to the collusion between
public and private interests (della Porta, 2015). Corruption often fosters grievances that citizens
can seek to voice – and try to mitigate – by engaging in anti-corruption campaigns and general
extra-institutional political behaviour.
It is, however, striking that the association between belief in extensive corruption and broader
non-electoral participation (NEP) has received little attention. By non-electoral participation we
mean engagement in political behaviour other than voting (Vráblíková, 2014); NEP includes activ-
ities such as demonstrating, petitioning, boycotting, or donating money to a political cause. Extant
literature is scarce and provides only mixed and partial results (Bauhr, 2017; Bauhr and Grimes,
2014; Bernburg, 2015; Boulding, 2014; Cornell and Grimes, 2015; Gingerich, 2009). While some
qualitative case studies suggest a positive relationship between corruption and extra-institutional
behaviour (Beyerle, 2014; della Porta et al., 2016; Grimes, 2008; Johnston, 2014; Mungiu-Pippidi,
2013; Torsello, 2012), the effect of perceived corruption on electoral turnout is predominantly
negative (cf. Stockemer, 2017). This seems to suggest that when conventional channels of mobili-
zation are not credible in the eyes of citizens, they may embrace contentious politics as a way to
express political discontent.
In this article we contend that belief in extensive corruption has a positive impact on non-elec-
toral participation. We qualify this argument by specifying that this effect is uneven across the
population. The association between perceiving widespread corruption and NEP is not purely addi-
tive, but rather contingent upon factors related to the individual’s political interest and education.
The neglected role of perceived corruption as a determinant of NEP is in part explained by ignored
interaction terms. In order to test our hypotheses empirically, we use the ISSP Citizenship 2014
module (ISSP Research Group, 2016), which includes 34 countries around the world.
Our findings not only contribute to the scholarship on political behaviour, but also seek to refine
theories of societal accountability, which have generally pointed at the most-educated and politi-
cally interested citizens as the societal driving force in the fight against corruption (e.g. Bauhr and
Grimes, 2014; Peruzzotti and Smulovitz, 2006). In contrast, we find that perceiving endemic cor-
ruption is likely to breed resignation, rather than indignation, across this section of the population.
Conversely, identifying corruption as a widespread phenomenon is likely to foster moral outrage
among the less resourceful citizens, who are then keener to embrace anti-elitist arguments and
ultimately engage in extra-institutional behaviour. This result also echoes more recent studies on
the ‘demand side’ of populism, which find that populist attitudes (and anti-elitism as one of their
defining components) can diminish education-based gaps and even reverse income-based inequali-
ties in political participation (Anduiza et al., 2019).
The article is structured as follows. In the next section, we review the state of the art on the
relationship between corruption and social movements, and hypothesize an association between
belief in extensive corruption and non-electoral mobilization. After that, we substantiate theoreti-
cally the need to implement interactive, rather than additive, research designs. We then present the
data section. In the fifth section, we report and discuss our empirical findings. We summarize the
main results and contributions in the conclusion, and signal some avenues for further inquiry.
Social movements and corruption
The fight against corruption has been at the core of mass protests that occurred across the globe in
the last decade, from Romania to France and Brazil,1 to mention just a few recent examples. Political
elites are often targeted for occupying and using state power in their own interests, thus revealing a
growing inability or unwillingness to respond to popular demands (Mungiu-Pippidi, 2013).
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