Master’s Thesis: 30 higher education credits Programme: Master’s Programme in Political Science Date: 05/22/2018 Supervisor: Georgios Xezonakis, PhD Words: 15016 INDIVIDUAL HETEROGENEITY IN CORRUPTION VOTING How External Political Efficacy Shapes Electoral Responses to Corruption

Abstract

Corruption poses a serious challenge to democratic accountability as electoral punishment of corrupt incumbents remains limited and varies considerably across contexts. Moreover, the empirical evidence indicates that widespread corruption leads citizens to ‘exit’ options, such as abstention from the electoral process. So far, the scarce literature investigating moderators of the relationship between corruption and turnout has been limited to macro-level contextual factors. Studies that examine how corruption perceptions affect party choice have also mainly concentrated on system-level moderators. This study introduces political efficacy as an individual-level factor shaping electoral responses to perceived corruption. I argue that political efficacy helps to overcome obstacles to corruption voting that have been previously identified in the literature. In my theoretical framework I specify mechanisms for these conditional corruption effects on a) turnout and b) party choice. Drawing on cross-national data of 64,256 individuals from 40 elections, I employ multilevel logistic regression models to test my hypotheses. In line with previous literature, I find that corruption perceptions have a negative effect on electoral participation. More importantly, my results suggest that political efficacy does not mitigate these detrimental effects of corruption perceptions on turnout. However, among voters, political efficacy does increase the saliency of corruption evaluations on voting choices, thereby strengthening accountability for corrupt activity.