Adaptive Tolerance to Corruption: Adaptive Responses and Pragmatic Attitudes in European Public Opinion

Comparative research on corruption has relied predominantly on perception-based indicators, often treating corruption as a direct cause of institutional distrust and democratic erosion. This approach tends to conflate prevalence, institutional and systemic evaluative attitudes, and broader cultural orientations, thereby obscuring the mechanisms through which citizens adapt to persistent institutional environments. The concept of adaptive tolerance suggests that stronger or weaker dispositions to justify corruption depend on a combination of contextual and cultural factors, including nationally embedded narratives of institutional underperformance and negative evaluations of the economic and political system, corresponding to both specific and diffuse political support (Easton, 1975). Drawing on theories of political support (Easton), social norms and expectations (Bicchieri), anomie and adaptive strategies (Merton), and the role of informal institutions (Helmke & Levitsky) that justify the existence of a certain level of corruption, adaptive tolerance is defined as a meso-level mechanism linking both individual and structural evaluations. It emerges when negative diffuse and specific evaluations generate empirical expectations that corruption is widespread, ineffective, and reporting useless. In such contexts, citizens do not endorse corruption normatively but lower their threshold of rejection as an adaptive response to perceived inefficiency, low state capacity, and weak enforcement. From this theoretical framework, the paper develops at a European scope the Adaptive Tolerance Index (ITA), a parsimonious additive indicator capturing three core dimensions: (1) normalization of corruption (“everyone knows about these cases and nobody reports them”); (2) apathy toward reporting (“it is not worth the effort to report corruption”); and (3) distrust in sanctioning capacity (“responsible will not be punished”). Crucially, perceived corruption is treated not as a component of tolerance but as an external contextual factor that conditions the intensity of tolerance (the higher the perception, the higher the tolerance). Methodologically, the study prioritizes transparency, replicability, and cross-wave comparability. The ITA is constructed using five waves of Special Eurobarometer surveys on corruption (2009, 2011, 2017, 2019, and 2024). To avoid overcontrol and conceptual circularity, only basic demographic controls (age, gender, and education) are included, enabling descriptive comparison while preserving the indicator’s theoretical meaning. The empirical strategy relies on multilevel linear models with individuals nested within countries, incorporating year fixed effects to account for temporal heterogeneity. Descriptive results show strong construct validity. As expected, adaptive tolerance varies systematically across European countries, with higher levels observed in Southern and Eastern Europe and consistently lower levels in Nordic and core Western countries, reflecting long-standing institutional legacies. Temporally and overall, adaptive tolerance declines markedly between 2011 and 2017 and stabilizes thereafter at lower levels, suggesting a reduction in pragmatic accommodation rather than a simple shift in moral attitudes. In conclusion, the paper defends adaptive tolerance as a distinct analytical concept and demonstrates how it can be operationalized using existing survey infrastructure. By separating tolerance from corruption perception, the ITA offers a theoretically grounded and policy-relevant tool for comparative, multilevel, and longitudinal research on corruption and institutional legitimacy.