Who Votes for Corrupt Political Parties and Why?

Corruption voting is increasingly receiving scholarly interest. The predominant view is that corrupt politicians are punished by the voters, but to a lesser extent that one would expect. As there are ample evidence of situations in which the voters “throw the rascals out” as well as cases in which apparently corrupt politicians are left unharmed, the focus in the research field has shifted from asking whether accountability mechanisms work or not when it comes to corruption, to explain under what conditions they do and do not. So far this has primarily been done in experimental studies in single countries and often in subnational elections. This paper in contrast, draws on unique survey data with 85 000 respondents from 215 NUTS 2 regions in 23 European countries, collected during 2013. The respondents were first asked to identify the party they voted for in the last parliamentary election and then if they would still vote for the same party if that party had (hypothetically) been involved in a corruption scandal, or if they would vote for another party or abstain from voting altogether. Preliminary results show that there is a large variation among the countries, some in which the voters have very little tolerance with corrupt parties and some in which the voters are more indifferent. In this paper I profile the typical “corruption voter”, by identifying the individual characteristics as well as the institutional and contextual features that make people generally more inclined to continue to vote for a corrupt party and discuss what the potential causal mechanisms may look like. This study will thus allow us to go beyond the previous single case studies and analyze this phenomenon comparatively, with many more control variables. This will enhance our understanding for the seemingly weak accountability mechanism.