Does Corruption Make Voters More Volatile? A Comparative Study on the Relationship between Corruption and Election Campaign Volatility in Western Democracies

Over the past few decades, corruption has undoubtedly become a big societal issue and a major field of interest in political science. Despite the growing number of empirical studies on the electoral consequences of corruption, there has so far been very few work done on the question whether citizens’ distrust in corrupt politicians leads to higher levels of uncertainty and volatility in the voting decision process. The present paper precisely examines the effect of corruption on stability and change in vote intentions during 16 national and subnational election campaigns: Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. Drawing on panel survey data from the cross-national project Making Electoral Democracy Work, this study aims to determine whether citizens’ perceptions about the level of corruption of their political elites may affect the stability of their voting preferences in the weeks preceding the elections. I test the frustrated floating voter hypothesis which holds that shifts in vote intentions can be largely attributed to political dissatisfaction. According to this hypothesis, voters who consider their political representatives as being corrupt should be more inclined than other voters to change their mind and to switch from one party to another during the campaign. Besides looking at the impact of corruption on campaign volatility, I also investigate whether the level of stability in vote intentions is influenced by other variables linked to political satisfaction such as trust in institutions and political actors, satisfaction with democracy and external political efficacy. Preliminary results show that voter’s judgment about the level of corruption in his/her country (or in his/her region) has a significant effect on campaign volatility. The higher the perceived level of corruption, the higher will be the probability of switching one’s vote intention during the campaign. Interestingly, the strength of this relationship between perceived corruption and campaign volatility varies from one country to another. Moreover, preliminary results demonstrate that voters with a low level of external political efficacy are more likely than other voters to switch parties in the last weeks of the campaign. This paper should thus bring some interesting insights into how citizens’ attitudes towards corruption may be related to uncertainty and instability of voting preferences.