Draining the Swamp? Populist leadership and corruption

Abstract

The resurgence of populism has presented a grave threat to democratic governance across the globe. Drawing on a cross-national dataset of 155 countries from 1960 to 2020, we leverage the leadership turnovers within countries and use fixed effects models to estimate the effect of populist leadership on corruption. We find that populist leadership is associated with a substantial increase in executive corruption, but not other types of corruption. We also provide evidence that populist leaders are more likely to undermine judicial and legislative constraints, which in turn opens the door for massive executive corruption. We further show that whereas affluent resources exacerbate populist leaders' corruption, high-quality bureaucracies, strong opposition parties, vigorous civil society organizations, and critical media work to mitigate the effect of populist leadership on corruption. This study contributes to the understanding of the nexus between populism and corruption and, more broadly, coping strategies for democratic backsliding.