Abstract
Two developments have marked EU democracies, with different levels of incidence and intensity, during the past two decades: the decline in support for democracy and the spread of corruption. Most individual-level analyses have identified the incumbent’s economic performance or government effectiveness as sufficient explanations of citizens’ growing dissatisfaction with democracy; whilst corruption has been downplayed as an explanatory variable by these multifactor analyses. We contend that this has partly to do with conceptual and methodological failings in the way perceptions about the phenomenon are measured. Defining corruption as abuse of office is insufficient to understand how perceptions about the decline of ethical standards in public life can be relevant to shape specific support for democracy. In this article, we propose an alternative conceptualization that goes beyond what is proscribed in the penal codes and special criminal laws, which the literature has recently defined as legal/institutional corruption, and demonstrate how it can offer an interesting explanation of citizens’ perceptions of the way democracy works in a European context (EU-27 member states).
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Source: European Commission (2013, p. 72)
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Notes
Mainstream conceptualisations of corruption tend to focus on bribery and relate to what is known as pocketbook evaluations, i.e. judgements driven by personal experience (see Klašnja et al. 2014, p. 70; Klašnja and Tucker 2013, p. 537), in contrast to a conceptualization of corruption linked to a broader moral (and also political) decay of the quality of government performance, the so-called sociotropic evaluations, i.e. judgements which take into account the notion of collective interest (Meehl 1977, p. 14).
27 member states of the EU were evaluated here: Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Bulgaria (BG), Cyprus (CY), Czech Republic (CZ), Denmark (DE), Estonia (EE), Finland (FI), France (FR), Germany (DE), Greece (EL), Hungary (HU), Ireland (IE), Italy (IT), Latvia (LV), Lithuania (LT), Luxembourg (LU), Malta (MT), Netherlands (NL), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Romania (RO), Slovakia (SK), Slovenia (SI), Spain (ES), Sweden (SE), and United Kingdom (UK). Croatia was not considered in the research due to the high number of invalid entries present in the database provided by the European Commission (see 2017a).
Satisfaction with democracy used the micro-data provided by European Commission (2017a) in its standard Eurobarometer no. 79.3. Macro-level results related to satisfaction with democracy considered information of the report Public Opinion in the European Union—Standard Eurobarometer no. 79 (European Commission 2013, p. 72). Eurobarometer 79 consulted 27,105 people aged 15 years and over from 27 EU member states between the 10th and 26th of May 2013.
Such index is based on the aggregate-level results of the special issue no. 397 of the Eurobarometer series (European Commission 2014, p. 13, 46, and 56). This survey interviewed 26,786 people aged 15 years and over from 27 member states of the European Union (EU) between the 23rd February and the 10th March 2013.
Political attitudes (such as political participation, representation, quality of government, and corruption) sometimes appear as explanatory variables of DwD, influenced by macroeconomic determinants or micro-level sociographics (see for e.g. Dahlberg et al. 2015; Quaranta and Martini 2017; Stockemer and Sundström 2013). Foster and Frieden (2017, p. 21), for example, show that political institutions are secondary to economic factors in explaining trust in the democratic functioning of European countries. However, they only focus on the short-term change in levels of trust. Political factors (including ‘beyond the law’ aspects of corruption) matter to explain long-term rather than short-term regime performance. The widespread dissatisfaction with democracy is the result of a lengthy and corrosive process, in which current economic results usually blur the boundaries between what constitutes amoral and corrupt behaviour. Poor macroeconomic records may exert a short-term influence on the perceived dissatisfaction with the way democratic works, but only a sociotropic-oriented political corruption makes such dissatisfaction endemic, resilient and increasingly pronounced.
A principal component analysis was used to merge all legal corruption dimensions into one. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) measure confirmed sample adequacy (KMO = 0.645) for the proposed one-scale reduction, Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant at a 1% level, and Kaiser eigenvalue criterion was obeyed (explaining 68.16% of the variance in a single factor).
Sociographic individual-level variables and political determinants (at micro and macro levels) are usually used in studies about DwD and corruption as controls (Dahlberg et al. 2015; Pellegata and Memoli 2016; Quaranta and Martini 2017; Stockemer and Sundström 2013; Wagner et al. 2009). Macroeconomic factors, albeit typically used in DwD studies, serve to determine in which circumstances economic outcomes exert influence on political support at the aggregate level. Recent literature suggests that citizens tend to become particularly sensitive to occurrences of corruption affecting political actors, institutions, and processes in contexts of economic crisis (Choi and Woo 2010; Zechmeister and Zizumbo-Colunga 2013).
Table 3 in the Appendix details the full operationalization of all control variables used.
Random-effects logit models were built using the Stata command ‘xtlogit’ and were grouped by countries.
All these studies were based on common sense concepts of corruption that describe it, with minor differences, as “the abuse of public office for private gain” (World Bank 1997, p. 8) or as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain” (Transparency International 2016). In essence, they considered only illegal aspects of corruption (Anderson and Tverdova 2003, p. 92; Dahlberg et al. 2015, p. 32; Memoli and Pellegata 2013, p. 14; Mishler and Rose 2001, p. 317; Pellegata and Memoli 2016, p. 395; Stockemer and Sundström 2013, pp. 144–146; Wagner et al. 2009, p. 40) and neglected what matters the most: its capacity to create manipulation of public policies and market regulations.
In multilevel models, when ρ (rho)—i.e. the proportion of total variance contributed by the panel-level variance—is 0, the panel-level variance component is unimportant and there is no need to run multilevel models. In this research, rho differs from 0 in all models, what constitutes an evidence for considering differences among countries. However, the values also indicate that the observations (albeit geographically dispersed) are homogenous throughout the entire set of European countries.
‘International experience’ presents promising results. It indicates that the more citizens visit other EU countries, the less they discredit their own national democracies. Future research is needed to disentangle such relation.
‘Urbanization’ (area of residence rural/urban) and ‘age’ present certain level of statistical significance (1 and 10%, respectively) and display coefficients near 0 (− 0.038 and − 0.006, respectively), what makes their contribution to the model extremely limited. Moreover, it is possible to argue that the relation rural-dissatisfaction raises a distributive problem because large cities concentrate public services and are central to the design of contemporary public policies. ‘Age’ could be seen as a complementary variable that describes intergenerational differences about DwD, young people have been facing difficulties in finding formal jobs, thus making them more susceptible of criticizing democratic performance and connect their evaluations with the 2008/2010 economic crises discourse.
The quality of national institutions was measured considering five dimensions of the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI): voice and accountability, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, the rule of law, and the control of corruption (see Kaufmann et al. 2009). In this case, corruption was indirectly used to perform the econometric exercises.
Institutional quality here refers to “an index developed by the International Country Risk Guide that provides a monthly rating of a country’s bureaucratic quality, level of corruption, and, government responsiveness” (for more information, see Foster and Frieden 2017, p. 8 and note 6). Albeit indirectly, corruption was used to evaluate levels of trust in governments.
See also Lange and Onken (2013).
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The authors are grateful to the reviewers and in particular to Pedro Magalhães, senior research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL), for their detailed and helpful comments. Needless to say, the authors are solely responsible for the contents and any errors and omissions that may be detected in the article.
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The opinions expressed in this article are the Gustavo Gouvêa Maciel’s own and do not reflect the official view of FUNAG.
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Maciel, G.G., de Sousa, L. Legal Corruption and Dissatisfaction with Democracy in the European Union. Soc Indic Res 140, 653–674 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1779-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1779-x