It once again occupied a prominent place on the public agenda, and it could not be otherwise. Two mega-scandals have recently come to light: and . Its developments are still ongoing, but they will intensely mark the . Furthermore, successive ones reverberate the issue. There will be an intense dispute over narratives about involvement in corruption, which will affect a few very polarized sectors, but will affect others. More importantly, it fuels public sentiment about the need to change course.
The feeling of systemic corruption generates the sea of mud effect: if all candidates are corrupt, corruption will lose importance. A found this effect in work carried out in Brazil. But research using experimental methods applied in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay qualified this conclusion: even when exposed to a situation of systemic corruption, voters punish corrupt behavior at the polls.
Corruption associated with works is less rejected. The old “steal and do” trade-off captures part of the dynamics underlying the psychology of voting.
Hyperpartisanship and polarization also mitigate the negative impact of corruption, but do not eliminate it. Often, the average effect of corruption is not large, but there is strong heterogeneity in the responses. In other words, the effect varies greatly between groups of voters. It is always much more intense among volatile voters — a crucial group in competitive contexts.
Although corruption is not the defining criterion — the “deal breaker”, in the jargon — for the majority of the electorate, it is part of the complex process of voting psychology, which does not occur in a single moment. According to jargon, this process is made up of “sequential heuristics”. Research on decision-making processes in electoral contexts shows that voters may initially discard candidates due to some other factor and then use corruption as a tiebreaker.
Corruption and public security are topics that interact with each other and have a multiplicative effect. There is strong evidence that tolerance for corruption is greater when the economy is doing well. And vice versa.
Here, the economy as perceived by voters is of interest, not economic indicators. It is not about the importance of the distinction, for example, the price level (“affordability”) versus the inflation rate. As I have already discussed here in the column, this perception suffers from many biases. The most important of these arises from polarization.
A similar process occurs when corruption is intertwined with violent crime.
Topics on the public agenda about which there is negative consensus, such as corruption or crime, create a feeling of change. Here, questions about whether the country is heading in the wrong direction are key. When these topics dominate the debate, they generate a feeling of change that penalizes incumbents.
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