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Sources of tolerance towards corrupted politicians in Greece: the role of trade offs and individual benefits

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Abstract

Reelection of corrupted politicians points to a problem of democratic accountability. Voters do have the chance to ‘throw the rascals out’, but they do not take it. Employing a survey experiment, we test two popular explanations of why Greek voters fail to effectively sanction corrupt politicians. One is related to the distorting effects of psychological attachment to parties and the second to tradeoffs that seem to come into play when voters weigh the prevalence of corruption against other tangible benefits that they receive from governments and parties, such as lower taxes or clientelistic exchanges. Our findings suggest that collective benefits, such as cutting taxes, outweigh the costs of tolerating political corruption. On the contrary, exclusive provision of goods to specific voters, such as in the case of clientelistic exchanges, seems to be negatively related to support for a corrupt politician and therefore should rather not be regarded as a source of tolerance to corruption, at least not in present time Greece.

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Notes

  1. As regards systemic opportunities for accountability, Greece checks a number of boxes. Despite having a PR electoral system Greece has been, at least until the early 2000s, an essentially two-party system. Moreover, since the two main parties, social democratic PASOK and conservative ND, alternated in power almost uninterruptedly between 1974 and 2009, clarity of responsibility has been quite high. Context, therefore, in the case of Greece is rather favourable.

  2. In their seminal work on corruption voting, Rundquist et al. [36] distinguish between material exchanges, such as those involved in clientelistic relationships, and non-material exchanges, such as the fostering of some policies which were most preferred by the voter. The authors use the terms 'explicit' and 'implicit' exchange, respectively; in this paper, we will focus on what they define as 'explicit exchange'.

  3. The ‘propensity-to-vote’ question was used so that we could later on test the ‘equality of means’ hypotheses for all our treatments against the control group described here.

  4. The vignette intentionally refers to 'a project of offering temporary jobs to unemployed citizens' and not 'to the respondent himself', since it was thought that the latter wording would result in a large number of socially desirable answers against the corrupted politician.

  5. Some may consider it quite reasonable that respondents of the ‘clientelism treatment’ group were less likely than the control group to vote for the corrupted politician; after all, the vignette referred to a system of hiring unemployed citizens (not the respondent himself) in the municipality services, by-passing the usual procedures of hiring employees in the public sector. The voter is expected to punish a patronage system which does not benefit him directly. However, given the extremely high unemployment rate in Greece nowadays (officially at 28 % in mid-2013), it is reasonable to expect that the respondents will identify themselves or a member of their family as potential beneficiaries of the mayor’s network. With this assumption in mind, we consider it striking that respondents of the ‘clientelism treatment’ group were less likely than the control group to vote for the corrupted politician. It seems as if the mayor’s attempt to preserve his/her clientelistic network is nowadays perceived as an additional charge to his corruption allegations. We will come back to this point later on.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Iannis Konstantinidis

  2. Quality of Government Institute, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Georgios Xezonakis

Authors
  1. Iannis Konstantinidis
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  2. Georgios Xezonakis
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Correspondence to Iannis Konstantinidis.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 All vignettes started as follows: ’Let’s assume that you are living in a small city’. They all finish by the question: ’How likely is it that you will support the mayor at the elections next month?’
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Konstantinidis, I., Xezonakis, G. Sources of tolerance towards corrupted politicians in Greece: the role of trade offs and individual benefits. Crime Law Soc Change 60, 549–563 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-013-9478-2

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