Expert surveys have shown that campaign finance is considered one of the greatest challenges for the integrity of elections worldwide, affecting both new and established democracies. How citizens perceive campaign finance issues is less well understood. In particular, it is debated whether or not campaign finance arrangements matter for citizen perceptions of corruption. Previous studies in the US context have shown that citizen perceptions of political corruption are shaped by various individual characteristics, such as partisanship, ideology, and support for the incumbent, although the contextual determinants of these perceptions are less clear. This paper examines the impact of campaign finance regulations on citizen perceptions of political corruption in cross-national comparison. To investigate this question, data on campaign finance regulations from International IDEA’s political finance database is combined with public opinion data on corruption perceptions from Wave 6 of the World Values Survey covering 40 countries. At the country level, the paper tests whether more regulation over campaign finance reduces corruption perceptions, and which regulations have the greatest impact on these perceptions. Using multilevel modelling, the paper then examines how the characteristics of individuals interact with the country context to determine public attitudes. For citizens with a higher level of education, it is expected that the relationship between campaign finance regulations and corruption perceptions would be stronger. This paper contributes to our understanding of how context shapes perceptions of political corruption and extends work on the individual predictors of corruption perceptions to a large N cross-national sample. The study has implications for debates on campaign finance reform.
