From ‘Fighting Corruption’ to ‘Fighting the Corrupt Elite’? Politicising Corruption Within and Beyond the Populist Divide

In Central and Eastern Europe, corruption has become a central issue of electoral campaigns. Initiatives such as Transparency International, the WGI by the World Bank and the European Union have emphasized the fight against corruption as important indicator for government performance, spilling over to opposition campaigns and political debates. More recently, however, the topic of corruption has gained momentum on different terms. Populist parties praise ‘the good people’ and demonize the ‘corrupt political elite’ that do not represent the popular will. In political terms, corruption has become more than the narrow definition of corrupt acts, making the fight against corruption an ambivalent issue. This paper sheds light on the term corruption in electoral campaigns by analyzing how the salience of anti-corruption claims correlates with other party characteristics, and particularly, how the patterns change over time. Using a new expert survey for 41 elections in 11 CEE countries, I show that anti-corruption claims have indeed gained in popularity among (radical) anti-establishment parties, and discuss under which circumstances the fight against corruption has been able to co-exist as issue beyond the populist divide.