A mass-elite congruence study on the social definition of corruption

The problem of defining corruption has been portrayed as a matter of cultural dissonance. Focusing more on discussing the constitutive elements necessary to create an encompassing definition to be applied across countries, literature has overlooked the fact that the meaning of corruption has been extensively contested also 'within' societies. This paper explored this 'intra-social' debate through a mass-elite perspective to hypothesize (and confirm) that those strata resort to distinct motivations when defining corruption. Using recent data coming from two surveys that asked a similar set of questions to citizens and politicians in Portugal, there was robust evidence to conclude that more than a matter of interculturality, the way corruption is defined depends largely on the level of tolerance towards concrete situations of corruption displayed. In the end, citizens presented a definition more anchored on the perception of corruption as something illegal and individual-oriented vis-à-vis the political elite and resorted more to political ideology to define corruption than politicians themselves. Considering the incongruence identified, it was showed that there is room to reconcile mass-elite social definitions of corruption through policies that diminish the level of tolerance towards corruption coming from politicians, thus acting to increment ethics self-regulation in politics.