Corruption and trust in the European Parliament: Quasi-experimental evidence from the Qatargate scandal

Abstract

Citizens' ability to hold corrupt politicians accountable is a key feature of democratic political systems. Particularly in the European Union (EU), such accountability mechanisms are often argued to malfunction due to the EU's complicated and opaque institutional structure, which could compromise voters' basic abilities to detect political malpractice in Brussels. Putting EU voters' attentiveness to the test, we provide quasi-experimental evidence of the causal effect of a recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament. Leveraging an ‘Unexpected Event during Survey Design’ identification strategy in France and Germany, we document a sizeable negative effect of the so-called Qatargate scandal on public trust in the European Parliament. This provides causal evidence on the presence of attentiveness to EU politics within these electorates. Given the EU's complex institutional structure, we derive two alternative implications from this finding.