Electoral Systems, Corruption and Satisfaction with Democracy

Corruption has been recognized as a detrimental factor of the citizens’ satisfaction with the way democracy works in their country and their confidence with political institutions. On the contrary, the direct impact of the institutional context on political support is less clear and previous studies present contradictory results. However, from a recent literature emerges that the institutional context plays a role in mediating the impact that the performance of the government authorities have on political support. This paper aims to analyze if and how the restraints posited by the electoral systems on political corruption affect the citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. The main argument advanced is that those characteristics of the electoral systems that help to constrain corruption among elected officials, strengthening the relation of accountability with the voters and favoring the monitoring by the opposition parties, weaken the negative effects of corruption on the level of political support expressed by citizens. Differently from previous studies that took into account the institutional context along the traditional distinction between majoritarian and proportional/consensual democracies, this paper focuses on specific aspects of the electoral system, such as the district magnitude, the ballot structure, the electoral formula and the level of vote-seats disproportionality. Several research hypotheses on the effect of corruption on political support conditional on the features of the electoral system are tested through a comparative multilevel design on a sample of 34 countries taken from the Module 2 of the CSES data. Results confirm that, even though there is not an electoral system that outperform the others, those features that reduce incentives of politicians to cultivate personal vote and extract rent from their position weaken the negative impact of perceived corruption on satisfaction with democracy