13:10 - 14:50
P13-S316
Room: -1.A.06
Chair/s:
Daniel Devine
Discussant/s:
Luís Russo
The Impact of National Corruption Scandals on Euroscepticism and Political Trust
P13-S316-1
Presented by: Jonathan Slapin
Jonathan Slapin 1, Aurora Palanza 1, Catherine De Vries 2
1 University of Zürich
2 Bocconi University
From time to time, corruption scandals rock politics on both the national and European levels. How do these scandals impact voters’ attitudes towards politics? Most existing literature focuses on the impact of corruption scandals at the level of government where the corruption occurs, e.g., studies find that scandals involving national politicians reduce trust in national politics. However, corruption scandals may reduce support for and trust in politics more generally, across different levels of government. In this paper, we use three different scandals, all of which broke during the fielding of different waves of the European Social Survey, to explore how scandal impacts voters’ attitudes towards politics across layers of government. We find that scandals on the national level have a tendency to reduce trust and satisfaction both with national politics as well as with European politics. Scandals that occur at the European level, in contrast, reduce trust and support for European politics and politicians, but not national-level politics, and then only among more educated voters. These findings are in direct contrast to existing literature on support for Europe, which suggests that, in the face of increasing corruption and poor government, voters may view Europe in a more positive light.
Keywords: Scandal, Euroskepticism, Trust, Random-Event-In-Survey Design, Regression Discontinuity

Sponsors