Anti-Corruption Politics and Reactionary Populism

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Right-wing, nationalist populism has become a significant feature of politics in the United States and Europe in the early twenty-first century. The Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election signaled the emergence of a new populism on the right that challenged traditional conservative politics. These events echoed the successes of more explicit right-populist political movements, such as that of Victor Orban and the Fidesz Party in consolidating power in Hungary, the the Law and Justice Party in Poland and the Northern League in Italy in forming coalition governments, and the increasing vote-share of the AfD in Germany and the National Front in France. Analysts have focused on two principal issues that drive right-populist mobilization: that of immigration and globalization. According to popular narratives, right-populist leaders have channeled extant feelings of economic grievance and cultural alienation against the structures that support free trade and foreign investment as well as refugee flows and the free movement of people across European borders.

As powerfully but not as prominently, new forms of reactionary populism have arisen in the developing world. The presidential elections of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil represent only two of several cases of new populists, heading new or transformed parties, that mobilize their supporters based on explicitly reactionary political programs. But the conventional drivers of right-wing populism in the West – opposition to immigration and free trade – are virtually absent from their political projects. These issues are of quite limited salience in developing countries, which experience net out-migration and have economies that are significantly and increasingly reliant on exports and foreign investment. To understand the causes of right-wing populism in the developing world, we must look beyond the drivers that are important in Europe and the United States.

Beyond an inchoate commitment to conservative social practices, such as opposition to the LGBTQ community, a powerful but understudied theme in the new conservatism in the developing world is mobilization against corruption. Populist leaders and political parties, from Duterte and Bolsonaro to the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf in Pakistan and the Bharatiya Janata Party in India, have highlighted corruption, particularly associated with that of patronage to previously excluded ethnic groups and cash transfer to poor populations, as both a social disease and a significant barrier to economic progress among their middle-class supporters. Rather than promising changes in policies away from the interests of technocratic globalist elites, as in western countries, reactionary populists have sought to empower the technocratic (and coercive) apparatus of the state to rein in corruption and thereby implicitly reinstate hierarchical social orders that have been disrupted by the democratic uprising of the poor. Anti-corruption politics are thus a vitally important feature of populism in developing countries, but one which has been largely overlooked by commentators in the West, and rarely examined in comparative perspective.

In this panel, we will explore the impact of different forms of anti-corruption politics, and the associated technocratic and law-and-order policy responses, as a way of further understanding the new conservatism in developing countries, through their impact in public opinion, electoral and contentious politics and public and social policy. We do so from different angles, using different approaches and focusing on different country and regional cases. Gonzalez-Ocantos and Pavao’s paper uses survey experiments to explore the effects of anti-corruption judicial activism in Brazil on public opinion, with special attention to voter’s emotional responses, leadership preferences, and levels of political cynicism. Ostermann and Ahuja’s paper presents a dichotomy between anti-corruption movements and the forces for democratic deepening in India, exploring the elite, anti-poor bases of the former. Naseemullah and Chhibber’s paper focuses on the anti-corruption and law-and-order campaigns that signalled the provision of security in electoral mobilization in particular party systems in Pakistan. Rich’s paper reflects on how anti-corruption policies in public administration have represented a substantial barrier to flexibility in the formulation of progressive social policies. It is our hope that bringing together different kinds of research on the theme of anti-corruption politics, we might augment a theoretically informed but empirically rich comparative research program of the causes of reactionary populism, by focusing on issues that are of greater salience in the developing world.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 12: Comparative Politics in Developing Countries

Individual Presentations

• Anti-Corruption Movements versus Democratic Deepening in India - Susan L. Ostermann, University of Notre Dame; Amit Ahuja, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Law and Order, the Coercive State and Pakistan's Party Systems - Adnan Naseemullah, King's College London; Pradeep Chhibber, University of California, Berkeley

• Studying Abroad and Corruption Attitudes: Evidence from Ukraine and Georgia - Jordan Luc Gans-Morse, Northwestern University

• Populism, Campaign Effects, and the Mobilization of Populist Voters in Mexico - Rodrigo Castro Cornejo, University of Virginia; Sandra Jessica Ley Gutierrez, CIDE; Ulises Beltran

Chair

• Irfan Nooruddin Georgetown University

Discussant

• William Hurst Northwestern University