Critical Citizens Revisited: Chapter 9 10/26/2009 5:13 PM

Critical Citizens Revisited: Chapter 9 10/26/2009 5:13 PM

Chapter 9

Probity: Scandal and corruption

The common feature of the cultural explanations is that they focus on aspects of citizens, emphasizing how people have changed in response to long-term social trends. Although extremely common in the mainstream research literature, cultural accounts have come under growing pressure from alternative supply-side perspectives which emphasize the context of government.

Perhaps the most popular explanation for any erosion of confidence in government and disenchantment with politicians emphasizes the impact of well-publicized cases of scandals or corruption, which are widely thought to tarnish the reputation of the legislative, executive or judicial branches of government.[1] Scandals represent the broader concept, as these include any action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong which cause general public outrage, reproach, or disgrace, commonly arising from financial or sexual behavior. Corruption, understood as the abuse of entrusted office for private gain, also involves multiple behaviors, but it is normally limited in common language usage to financial acts typified by bribery, extortion, fraud, illegal financial contributions to parties or politicians, and irregular payments for contracts, licenses or permits.

Numerous well-known specific examples of both types of behavior are exemplified in the United States by the Watergate crisis in 1972, the House Banking scandal in 1992, and the Lewinsky case in 1998. Other well-known examples in Italy include the Tangentopoli scandal in the early 1990s and corruption charges against Prime Minister Silvio Berlosconi. In Britain, as well, there are countless instances, notably the series of minor sexual and financial shenanigans which damaged the reputation of John Major’s administration during the mid-1990s, leading to a series of ministerial resignations, and more recently the outbreak of publicity in May 2009 regarding the expenses claimed by Members of Parliament, fuelling the resignation of the Speaker and the deselection of many incumbent MPs, public outrage and protests about these practices, and a general disgust with Westminster politics. In Latin America, the rise of corrupt leadership, election fraud, bribery, and clientelism has been regarded as deeply detrimental to the consolidation of democracy.[2] Multilateral development agencies, including the World Bank, Transparency International and the Global Integrity, have prioritized the fight against corruption in their programs designed to strengthen good governance around the world. This new impetus has generated a substantial research literature on the causes and consequences of corruption. [3]

H#2.0 Incidents of scandal and corruption depress political trust

Corruption and scandal are therefore widely regarded today as one of the most important causes of political mistrust. It remains difficult to document this claim with systematic evidence, however, in part because, as Dogan notes, there can be a substantial lag between the time when a specific scandal breaks and the cumulative effect of its impact.[4] Some of the most systematic evidence suggesting a connection was produced by Chanley, Rudolph and Rahn, who measured the impact of congressional and presidential scandals on quarterly changes in trust in the American federal government.[5] The study concluded that Congressional (but not presidential) scandals significantly depressed trust in American government; events such as the House Banking scandal and the Post Office scandal each led to an approximately 4% decline in trust in the federal government. Other time-series analysis has demonstrated stronger evidence for the impact of scandal events on falls in American presidential popularity.[6] Cross-national comparisons also suggest a significant link. Anderson and Tverdova compared Transparency International’s perceived levels of corruption in 1996 across 16 post-industrial democracies against the 1996 ISSP survey data on the role of government. They found that perception of corruption were related at macro level to less trust in civil servants and more negative evaluations of the overall performance of the political system.[7] A comparison of fifteen industrialized societies by Andrain and Smith also found that high perceived levels of corruption were also associated with weaker public support for democratic ideals, as monitored by the World Values Survey in the mid-1990s.[8] Nevertheless the use of standard regression models in the analysis of national contextual effects may well have over-estimated the appropriate degrees of freedom, and thus generated misleading results. Others who have employed multilevel analysis report that levels of perceived corruption had no significant impact on citizen’s satisfaction with democracy.[9]

Explaining the dynamics of political trust over time

Building on this research literature, to understanding how scandals and corruption could potentially erode institutional confidence or reduce trust in government over time, the ‘probity’ explanations generates three distinct logical propositions, related to each of the key actors. Political trust could have fallen in recent years because of: (i) a decline over time in the actual behavior of public officials, notably through the growing frequency or severity of actual incidents of scandal and corruption; (ii) rising public expectations of the appropriate ethical standards governing sexual and financial behavior in public life; and (iii) growing coverage by the news media in reporting these types of stories.

H#2.1 Falling standards of public life?

The first proposition suggests that the actual number of cases of sexual scandals and financial corruption has risen on the supply-side; in this regard, standards of public life, and thus the number of incidents of inappropriate behavior, may have worsened substantially over the years. This development could be attributed to increasingly liberal sexual behavior and alternative life-styles on issues such as divorce, extramarital infidelity, or homosexuality, with elites possibly adopting more liberal and tolerant social mores and sexual standards than the general public. The role of money in politics could also plausibly play a role, for example if the rising cost of professional election campaigns has encouraged more venal acts by politicians and the provision of clientalistic services, misusing public funds for political gain. The idea that the public has lost faith in those in authority as standards of public life have worsened through scandals is the most commonsense interpretation, but the independent evidence to corroborate this claim is difficult to establish. What chapter 5 can examine, however, is data on perceptions of corruption in countries worldwide, derived from Transparency International’s annual surveys of experts since 1995. This allows us to monitor trends in perceived corruption, to see if these have indeed worsened over time. Moreover we can also examine whether the dynamics of trust in government, measured by the World Values Surveys in 1995 and 2005, responds to fluctuations in each country’s Corruption Perception Index during the same decade.

H#2.2: Rising public expectations of public officials?

Alternatively, even if the actual severity and number of such sexual and financial scandals in public life has not changed, it is also possible that on the demand-side, over time the public may have developed higher expectations of the appropriate standards of public officials. As with cases of sexual harassment in the workplace, personal behavior which was once commonplace among employees in factories and offices, such as verbal comments of a sexual nature, the display of offensive sexual materials, or unwelcome physical contact, became increasingly regarded as ethically unacceptable in many societies, as shown by the expanding body of anti-sexual harassment laws and regulations.[10] In the same way, greater emphasis on standards of transparency, accountability, and integrity in public bodies may have raised the bar for socially acceptable behavior by politicians and civil servants. More openness in parliaments is available due to developments such as the expanding body of freedom of information laws, direct television broadcasting of parliamentary debates, committees and proceedings, the online publication of voting records, and information about members available via parliamentary websites.[11] Some indirect evidence to test claims about rising ethical standards in public life can be examined by analyzing changes over time in attitudes towards moral issues, utilizing the World Values Survey, including items monitoring public tolerance of bribery and corruption, as well as divorce, prostitution, and homosexuality. If the public in many countries has become more traditional and conservative over time on these sorts of issues, this could suggest stricter standards are being used for evaluating the financial and sexual behavior of officials in public life. If the public has become generally more tolerant and permissive over time on these issues, on the other hand, then we have to look elsewhere for the answer.

H#2.3 Growing media coverage of scandals and corruption?

The last version of the probity thesis suggests that even if politicians and the public have not changed, as a key intermediary in the marketplace, media coverage of public affairs may have become more negative and more personalized over time, potentially increasing public perceptions that scandals and corruption have become more prevalent. In free societies, the news media has traditionally long played the role of ‘watch-dog’ as the fourth estate of government.[12] As ‘watch-dogs’, the news media has a responsibility to help guard the public interest, ensuring the accountability of powerful decision-makers by highlighting cases of malfeasance, misadministration, and corruption, thereby strengthening the transparency and effectiveness of governance. The defining feature of investigative journalism is not the political stance of the individual reporter, story, or media outlet, but rather the role of asking hard or probing questions of the powerful in order to maximize transparency and to serve the public interest. On a routine basis, timely and accurate information provided by news coverage of public affairs should help citizens to evaluate the performance of political leaders and parties, for example the government’s record in reducing poverty or improving economic growth. Investigative reporting commonly highlights failures in government, especially those arising from cases of bribery, corruption, and malfeasance, from abuse of power, or from incompetent management of public service delivery. The notion of reporters as watchdogs is one common in many democratic states, as confirmed by surveys of journalists in Sweden, the United States and Britain.[13]

The consequences of this process may also have unintended consequences if reporting damages the reservoir of political trust. What is the evidence for this claim? Content analysis of the news media suggests that in some established democracies, at least, journalism has become increasingly critical of politicians and the policymaking process, shifting from ‘watch-dog’ to ‘attack-dog’ mode. The personal behavior of political leaders, which would have remained in the private domain a generation ago, is now increasingly the fodder of front-page headlines. In the United States, commentators such as Thomas Patterson have noted growing negative coverage of public affairs in the news media, a development correlated with rising public cynicism in American public opinion during these years.[14] Negative coverage of the press, the military and organized religion has also been associated over time with declining American confidence in these institutions.[15] Similar observations are echoed in Europe; hence Kepplinger argues that the long-term decline in public esteem about politicians which has occurred in Germany since the late-1960s is associated with increasingly negative press coverage.[16] Content analysis of three leading German newspapers found that the growth in negativity was associated in particular with coverage of politicians’ personal qualities (such as their honesty, credibility and integrity) and their problem-solving skills (including their decision-making abilities and knowledgeability). From the mid-1960s onwards, Kepplinger concluded, in Germany “Politicians were increasingly portrayed as failures who were unable to find solutions to existing problems.” In this regard, the media may encourage the public to regard politicians as untrustworthy or, at least, incompetent and ineffective. In Japan, Susan Pharr also showed how reports on corruption in Asahi Shimbun, a major national newspaper, expanded over time, with peaks around specific scandals.[17] Experimental research in the Netherlands has also found that strategic campaign coverage by the press, focused on stories about spin and party strategies rather than issues, has increased public cynicism. [18]

Nevertheless even if media coverage of politics has become increasingly negative over time, this does not prove a direct association between these developments and rising public disenchantment with politicians. The connection between the two trends could always be spurious. Alternatively, the presumed direction of causality could also be reversed, for example if the public’s disenchantment with political leaders has gradually encouraged news organizations competing in the marketplace to respond to reader’s interests by expanding scandal coverage (hence, thereby, maximizing potential newspaper sales). Most of the previous research on this topic has been conducted in established democracies, with news media systems and cultural values which differ from the situation common in developing countries and emerging democracies. Clearly disentangling the time-series evidence on these issues requires careful attention to the periodicity of scandal coverage. The ability of the press to criticize political leaders also varies substantially in different countries and types of regimes, so we need to compare trust within these distinct contexts. The coverage of scandals and corruption could also have grown without having any significant impact on public opinion, for example if people are already deeply cynical about government. We therefore need direct evidence to analyze any potential media effects by comparing individual-level attention to the news media. Most previous research has found that people who pay attention to the news media are usually more trusting, not less. [19]

Overall, therefore, probity theories are popular, calling attention to changes in the behavior of political elites, public expectations of public officials, and/or the role of the news media. The cross-national evidence to examine these propositions is more limited, however, since ideally this needs time-series data on the content of the news media, as well as survey data monitoring public opinion (and media use) during the same period. Selected case studies in Germany, Britain, the United States and South Africa allow us to examine trends in news media coverage and public opinion during the last decade. Moreover we can also look more generally at the relationship between cross-national perceptions of corruption and patterns of political trust, to examine this relationship.

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[1] Suzanne Garment. 1991. Scandal: The Crisis of Mistrust in American Politics. New York: Random House; Gary Orren 1997. ‘Fall from grace: The public’s loss of faith in government.’ In Why People Don’t Trust Government. Ed. Joseph S. Nye, Jr, Philip D. Zelikow and David C. King. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[2] Charles H. Blake and Stephen D. Morris (Editors). 2009. Corruption and Democracy in Latin America Pitt Latin American Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.