How Polarization Undermines Anti-Corruption Interventions and Erodes Democracy – Comparing Eastern Europe and Latin America

Recent scholarship argues that severe polarization is both an important cause and an effect of recent episodes of democratic decline. An alternative body of work sees undue influence and state capture as a root cause of the rise of authoritarianism. Despite a growing interest in ‘pernicious polarization’ as an important factor of democracy backsliding, and an explosion of interest in ‘kleptocracy’, little work exists to bridge these separate concerns. The literature is at best ambiguous about the effect of corruption on partisan polarization and especially on the opposite, the role of polarization in the evolution of corruption, with some authors even finding positive effects of polarization on democratic processes and the quality of democracies. Focusing on electoral democracies specifically, we address this gap in the current paper by arguing that political polarization is in fact harmful to corruption control because it reduces the non-partisan, objective constituency for integrity and ethical universalism. We use examples from Eastern Europe and Latin America to illustrate this argument, while showing that the complexity of the relation cannot be captured fully by quantitative designs.