by: Noah Buckley
| In autocracies, officials’ malfeasance frequently serves as a spark for public discontent. As a result, authoritarian leaders often attempt to portray egregious cases of corruption in a positive light: these are merely a few bad apples we are already dispatching with. In this paper, I ask: when does the public view corrupt officials as emblematic of a broadly rotten regime and when do they see them as isolated cases of a regime doing its best to clean house? I examine the effects of authoritarian officials being punished for corruption on public opinion. I combine a large dataset of public opinion survey responses regarding regime approval in Putin-era Russia from 2003-2020 with extensive, novel data on the arrest and prosecution of regional officials. Together with a difference-in-differences design, this allows me to identify the effects of revelations of corruption in an authoritarian regime on the public’s attitudes. |
Authoritarian Political Systems Group 