Public Reactions to Corruption Scandals: Evidence from Brazil

• In Event: Comparative Courts & Legal Systems Mini-Conference: Democracy and the Courts

Abstract

How do corruption scandals impact public trust in the judiciary? Corruption scandals shock the public and present challenges to democratic institutions. In the wake of these scandals, the judicial branch is tasked with investigating and punishing corruption. Because judiciaries are beholden to the general public for their legitimacy and power, public perceptions of the judiciary become doubly important in the context of corruption scandals. We test two competing hypotheses: 1) that scandals increase judicial trust by rallying support around prosecutors and judges to hold the corrupt accountable; and 2) that scandals decrease judicial trust by rendering the judiciary as ineffective at keeping corruption in check, or as bundled together with other corrupted institutions. We test our hypotheses in the Brazilian context and with the 2015 round of the Latinobarometer survey, which was fielded amidst breaking news that implicated the incumbent Workers’ Party (PT) in an historic corruption scandal. We exploit this “unexpected event during survey design” as a quasi-experiment, assessing whether exposure to news of the scandal increases or decreases trust. Our findings show that scandals significantly decrease judicial trust among the public, and more so than in other political institutions. Surprisingly, these effects on trust are not mediated by partisanship, level of education, or political ideology, as previous findings suggest. Overall, our findings suggest that corruption scandals undermine the public trust on which judicial institutions rely to root out and punish corruption.

Authors

• David De Micheli, University of Utah

• Whitney K Taylor, San Francisco State University