ABSTRACT

While corruption of different types has been shown to lower popular political trust in democratic regimes, evidence from non-democracies remains inconsistent. In some post-Soviet countries, for instance, widespread bribery and nepotism in the government co-exist with enduring popularity of top political leadership. Drawing on an unusually nuanced dataset from Russia (N = 2,350), we show that, in general, encounters with corruption in the public sector are associated with citizens’ lower trust of their government. At the same time, we theorize two caveats that attenuate this relationship, contributing to inconsistent findings in previous studies. First, we find that the negative association between corruption and political trust is significantly weaker when such corruption is beneficial to ordinary people. Second, citizens tend to “penalize” local rather than central government officials, which, we argue, is a result of top leaders’ ability to manipulate public discourse around corruption.

摘要

虽然不同类型的腐败已被证明会降低民众对民主政权的政治信任，但来自非民主国家的证据仍然不一致。例如，在一些后苏联国家，政府中普遍存在的贿赂和裙带关系与高层政治领导层的持久受欢迎并存。利用来自俄罗斯的一个异常细微的数据集（N = 2,350），我们表明，一般而言，公共部门遭遇腐败与公民对其政府的信任度较低有关。同时，我们对减弱这种关系的两个警告进行了理论化，导致先前研究中的结果不一致。首先，我们发现当腐败对普通民众有利时，腐败与政治信任之间的负相关关系明显减弱。第二，