Abstract
Daily worldwide newspapers are filled with campaigning unveiling political corruption. Despite this information be worrying to many citizens, political researchers have not identified any consistent trend of decline of support among party sympathizers. This study utilizes neuroimaging for the first time to examine the neuropsychological origin of party closeness variation among backers of a liberal (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, PSOE) and a conservative party (Popular Party, PP) in Spain after a month receiving corruption messages among their preferred party. Brain data provide some explanation as to the origin of party closeness reduction among liberal sympathizers: areas involved with negative feelings, disappointment and self-relevance served to predict party closeness reduction 30 days in advance. Implications for liberals and conservatives’ campaigns are discussed.
Highlights
Corruption continues to be a challenge for the world and for Europe
As the main goal of the research is to evaluate the differences among the neural predictors of party closeness change among PSOE and PP sympathizers when faced with messages exposing political corruption, the experiment only retained subjects whose ideologies aligned themselves with the two major Spanish political parties
The results indicate a significant decrease among PSOE sympathizers of party closeness after exposure to news items describing corruption during the month following the scan (Mprescan = 8.6, M post30 = 7.3, t (9) = 2.32; p = 0.04))
Summary
Corruption continues to be a challenge for the world and for Europe. It is a phenomenon that costs the European economy between €179 billion and €950 billion each year. Worldwide newspapers are filled with articles unveiling political corruption, which takes many forms: trading in influence, bribery, conflicts of interest or nepotism [1]. Do these political messages drive to a loss of closeness, sympathy or votes for the corrupt parties?. The findings of certain research in the field of advertising have strongly backed the importance of the role of messages revealing actions of political parties in shaping perceptions and closeness to both politicians and parties, and their influence on voting behavior [2,3]. Merritt [4] or Pattie et al [5], for instance, have identified that negative political communications (messages seeking to demean the perception of an opposite party or candidate) evoke negative effects toward both the targeted opponent and the sponsor
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