Mass-elite (in)congruences when defining corruption: assessing citizens’ and politicians’ networks of words/expressions associated to corruption in Portugal

There is little knowledge on what are the expressions that in fact citizens and politicians have in mind (and use) when referring to corruption. The term corruption is recurrent in conversations and political debates, but it can have different meanings for different individuals. This paper analyzes the main words/expressions that 1,020 citizens and 121 politicians associated with corruption when answering the same open question as to create both a social and a political definition for corruption. Data came from two surveys on ethical and corruption-related issues implemented in Portugal during the same period (from October 2020 to April 2021): the FCT-EPOCA survey – conducted with the general public – and the FFMS-ETHICS survey – conducted with MPs and local elected officials in office. Applying an emerging technology (network analysis/visualization based on the adoption of a force-oriented algorithm), we (1) map the associations between the expressions that citizens and politicians used to define corruption, (2) group these expressions into communities/dimensions, and (3) discuss them in detail. Based on the “words of the Portuguese (citizens and politicians) themselves”, we found a multilevel social definition of corruption that consists of ‘theft of money by politicians’ (a minimalist definition) contained within a maximalist definition that described corruption as ‘misconducts with private benefits that distort the purpose of institutions’. At the same time, the political definition of corruption was much more restricted to ‘misconducts with private benefits’ omitting the institutional dimension of corruption, which was relevant to define corruption socially. We believe this alternative methodology to define and evidence mass-elite incongruences related to corruption can function as a powerful tool to better understand the existing dimensions of corruption in a given social/political context and to have a more detailed definition for corruption that takes the cultural aspects of the country/region into consideration. In the end, anti-corruption initiatives can benefit from this exercise, since the more knowledge we have about the meanings of corruption, the more equipped we become to tackle it efficiently.