Fighting Corruption, Fighting Populism: The Case of Spain

• In Event: Crime, Corruption, and Elite Behavior

Abstract

The recent rise of populism has been extensively addressed by scholars and the media. Different explanations have been proposed for justifying the rise of political actors such as Trump in the US, Milei in Argentina, Vox and Podemos in Spain, and the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and the occurrence of corruption scandals have been seen as one of the types of political crises that can lead to the rise of populism. The Manichean division of populism, in which the people are defined as pure and the elite as corrupt —as well as anti-elitism— can be boosted by scandals in which the latter group is not only allegedly corrupt but factually.
However, little is known about the effect of corruption scandals on populist attitudes —or what is the same, on how populist individuals are—, and even less about the effect of political responses to corruption scandals, especially when relating to populism. In 2018, the Spanish governing People’s Party was convicted of corruption. As a response, the opposition presented a no-confidence vote, which overthrew the government. Taking advantage of the coincidence of those events with the data collection of a survey, I explore the effects of changes in government as a response to corruption scandals on populist attitudes using an Unexpected Event during Survey Design (UESD) design.
Do changes in government lead to the reduction of populism at the individual level? If so, is this effect present for both winners and losers of the change in government? Does institutional trust play a role in this relationship? This article shows changes in government after corruption scandals reduce populist attitudes among the public. However, this effect is only found for winners of the government alternation, and it is found to be fully mediated by institutional trust. Accordingly, while corruption has usually been considered a trigger of populism, this article highlights the importance of the mechanisms liberal democracies have for responding to crises and ultimately palliate their effect on the rise of populism, especially stressing the role of institutional trust among the citizenry for keeping them engaged with liberal democratic systems.

Author

• Juan Pérez Rajó, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona