Legal Corruption and Dissatisfaction with Democracy in the European Union

Two developments have marked EU democracies, with different levels of incidence and intensity, during the past two decades: the decline in support for democracy and the spread of corruption. Most individual-level analyses have identified the incumbent’s economic performance or government effectiveness as sufficient explanations of citizens’ growing dissatisfaction with democracy; whilst corruption has been downplayed as an explanatory variable by these multifactor analyses. We contend that this has partly to do with conceptual and methodological failings in the way perceptions about the phenomenon are measured. Defining corruption as abuse of office is insufficient to understand how perceptions about the decline of ethical standards in public life can be relevant to shape specific support for democracy. In this article, we propose an alternative conceptualization that goes beyond what is proscribed in the penal codes and special criminal laws, which the literature has recently defined as legal/institutional corruption, and demonstrate how it can offer an interesting explanation of citizens’ perceptions of the way democracy works in a European context (EU-27 member states).