Corruption and citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in Europe: what is the empirical linkage?

This article evaluates the influence of corruption on how individuals assess the state of democracy in their country. Distinguishing between individual perceptions of small-scale corruption and macro-level corruption trends, we are interested in the question: which of the two indicators influences citizens’ judgments of their regime? Controlling for ten micro-level factors (i.e. individuals’ satisfaction with the government, economy, education system, their participation in social activities, their feeling of public safety, and their assessment on whether they are discriminated against, as well as the four demographics gender, age, education and income) and four contextual factors (i.e. development, economic growth, democratic stock, and income inequalities) our hierarchical linear model offers some nuanced results. First, we find that an individual’s assessment of whether the police and the judges are corrupted influences his or her satisfaction with democracy. Second, our results indicate that the same finding does not apply for the broad macro-level corruption indicator; macro-level corruption is rather unrelated to how a person judges the quality of democracy in his or her country.