A Little Too Little, A Little Too Late: The Political Impact of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Enforcement

Marina Zaloznaya () and William M. Reisinger
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Marina Zaloznaya: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA
William M. Reisinger: College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA

Laws, 2025, vol. 14, issue 2, 1-19

Abstract: Similarly to “wars” on drugs and terrorism, the fight against corruption has recently emerged as an attractive political tool. From Argentina and India to the United States and the Philippines, anti-corruption rhetoric has been successfully utilized by political outsiders to challenge establishment candidates. It remains less clear, however, whether anti-corruption enforcement allows incumbent politicians to hold on to power. In this article, we use a comparative subnational design to analyze the impact of corruption prosecutions on electoral support for the president of Russia. By combining original survey data on popular political attitudes and behaviors as well as citizens’ own participation in petty corruption with official statistics on corruption prosecutions, on the one hand, and data on media coverage of regional corruption scandals, on the other, we reveal a small negative effect of anti-corruptionism on voting for Putin. Our data allow us to adjudicate among several theoretical mechanisms that may lead to this effect. We find that, although ordinary Russians dislike corruption and expect the federal government to fight it, Putin’s anti-corruption enforcement has failed to convince the population that he is the right man for the job. Some Russians, we argue, take the Kremlin’s prosecutions as an indicator of the regime’s failure to prevent corruption among its agents, while others resent the administration for trying to score political points through hyped-up and punitive anti-corruptionism.

Keywords: anti-corruption; prosecutions; authoritarianism; regime (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 E61 E62 F13 F42 F68 K0 K1 K2 K3 K4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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