Corruption and partisan feelings: A valence perspective on explaining affective polarization

The bulk of the research on the drivers of affective polarization has focused either on policy disagreement or the strength and overlap of political and social identities. In this paper, we argue that corruption – which is broadly regarded as a valence issue - is a hitherto overlooked factor that helps us gain a better understanding of the structural foundations of affective polarization. Corruption is a phenomenon that has been associated with various adverse outcomes, such as lower institutional trust and weaker economic performance. We contend that while corruption tends to decrease the overall confidence in political institutions, including parties, partisan motivated reasoning leads voters to ascribe most of the blame to their out-parties, whereas in-party feelings are more immune to it. Consequently, higher levels of corruption should increase the gap between in- and out-party feelings, signifying greater affective polarization. As such, our theory combines the rational/political and the tribalist/identitarian approaches on the foundations of affective polarization. We test this hypothesis first at the system level, using the classic party like-dislike scale from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) to calculate affective polarization for ca 200 country-year cases. Controlling for the other variables that have been associated with affective polarization, we identify the effect of corruption on both the average in- and out-party ratings at the country level. We then move to the individual level, employing original survey data collected recently in four European countries (Estonia, Hungary, Italy, France). Survey items capturing feelings towards parties, ideological distance perceptions, partisanship, and a unique question that asked respondents to evaluate party-level corruption - i.e. how corrupt do they think are the individual parties in their respective country – allows us provide a more fine-grained analysis of the relationship between corruption and affective polarization. Our findings contribute to the burgeoning literature on the determinants of affective polarization by improving our understanding of how the selective distribution of socio-economic resources shapes partisan feelings.