Do Anti-Corruption Parties Matter? The electoral fate and policy impact of the third wave of niche parties in central and Eastern Europe

Niche parties have been increasingly successful during the last 30 years. Parties focusing on immigration and environment have long been in business and their impact on the political discourse as well as on policy outcomes is well established. In this paper I analyze the electoral fates and policy outcomes of the third wave of niche parties, namely those focusing on anti-corruption, whose successes culminated during the 2000s. The focus is exclusively on new and splinter parties from Central and Eastern Europe and the questions to be answered are: To what extent are these parties successful in obtaining relevant positions in the government to be able to effectively fight corruption? What impact do they have on anti-corruption measures, thereby influencing the level of corruption? How successful are these parties in the following elections? In short, to what extent do anti-corruption parties matter? The results are rather mixed, but indicate that the more influential positions those parties have in government, the better are their anti-corruption performances, which implies that they are serious and competent enough to tackle those issues, despite their newness and lack of experience. Not surprisingly, the incumbent anti-corruption parties fare worse than those in opposition in subsequent elections, but quite a few still remain popular. Finally, all but one party abandoned their anti-corruption rhetoric in their second election, which implies that anti-corruption is a different type of issue, compared to the ones used by previous niche parties

Voter Ideology, Party Systems and Corruption Voting in European Democracies

There is growing literature on an increasingly ubiquitous puzzle in many democratic countries: why do corrupt officials continue to be re-elected by voters? In this study we address this issue with a novel theory and newly collected original survey data for 24 European countries. The crux of the argument is that the ideological position of the voter together with the number of reasonable party alternatives explains why citizens would continue voting for their preferred party despite it being involved in a corruption scandal. Developing a theory of supply (number of effective parties) and demand (voters‘ acceptable alternatives to their preferred party in relation to their ideological position), we posit that there is a ‘U-shaped’ relationship between the likelihood of corruption voting and where voters place themselves on the left/right spectrum. However, as the number of viable party alternatives increases, the effect of ideology is expected to play a smaller role. The hypothesis implies a cross-level interaction for which we find strong and robust empirical evidence using hier-archical modeling. In addition, we provide empirical insight into how individual level ideology and country level party systems - among other factors - impact a voter’s decision to switch parties or stay home in the face of their party being involved in a corruption scandal

Who votes for Anti-Corruption Parties? The Emergence of a New Party Family

Corruption and issues related to quality of government are becoming increasingly salient to both voters and parties all around the globe. One indication of that is the steady increase in the number of electoral campaigns in which corruption is politicized by parties and candidates (Bågenholm & Charron, 2014; Curini, 2018). Whereas a lot of attention recently has been paid to the phenomenon of corruption voting, i.e. the extent to which the electorate is holding corrupt politicians and parties accountable by ‘voting such rascals out’, considerably less research has been done on the supply side of this equation, namely the parties that campaign on fighting corruption. Surprisingly enough, even recent research on party categorization has ignored the issue of corruption. This paper aims at filling this gap by asking if - from a voter perspective – valence parties that specifically focus on anti-corruption can be considered a distinct type of party. To answer this question we analyze data from the latest round of the QoG Regional Survey from 2017, which covers 21 European countries, comparing ACP supporters with supporters of other party families. Preliminary results suggest that ACP voters in some respects are distinct both demographically and attitudinally from the voters of other party families, which suggest that it is reasonable to argue that anti-corruption parties are a distinct type of party, or at least not less distinct than parties

Does Party Politicization of Corruption Affect Voter Turnout?

In this paper, we argue that the effects of corruption on voter turnout not necessarily have to be negative. We argue that voters’ willingness to participate in elections will increase when parties po-liticize the issue of corruption in electoral campaigns, as it indicates party responsiveness to voter concerns. We test this claim by using individual-level data from CSES coupled with unique context data on party politicization of corruption in campaigns. Our findings show that higher perceived levels of corruption are associated with lower voter turnout but that the negative effect of perceiv-ing high corruption on turnout is reduced in an electoral context where corruption is politicized. The results thus show that if corruption is not politicized, individuals’ corruption perceptions exert a significant negative impact on turnout. By politicizing anti-corruption measures, political parties are acting policy responsive and by that they are also affecting voters’ decision whether to vote or not