There’s no corruption like corruption: perception and experience in relation to political participation

Abstract

Corruption is a very frequent term in scientific literature. While negative corruption generally affects the economic development of the country or market and impacts people’s trust in individuals and institutions, the relationship between corruption and political participation remains unclear. On the one hand, there is a theoretical argument that corruption discourages political participation and by its nature excludes citizens from the political process. On the other hand, there is a theoretical assertion that, on the contrary, it leads to political participation in which a voter has the opportunity to replace a corrupt politician in the elections. In most cases, research on corruption and political participation is limited to the perception of corruption on the one hand and voter turnout on the other. However, both corruption and political participation can take many forms. The article therefore distinguishes between three forms of corruption and examines their impact not only on participation in elections, but also on political meetings, community meetings and protests. Logistic regression analysis is performed and eight regression models are constructed. The research is focused on two South American countries – Venezuela and Chile. Due to the case selection, the article uses data on an individual level from the Latin American Public Opinion Project. The conclusions are that while the perception of corruption discourages political participation in both countries, experience of corruption in Venezuela, a country in which every fifth citizen encounters bribery, on the contrary leads to political mobilization. This contra sts with Chile, where this variable was not statistically significant at all.