Explaining Putin’s impunity: public sector corruption and political trust in Russia

ABSTRACT While corruption of different types has been shown to lower popular political trust in democratic regimes, evidence from non-democracies remains inconsistent. In some post-Soviet countries, for instance, widespread bribery and nepotism in the government co-exist with enduring popularity of top political leadership. Drawing on an unusually nuanced dataset from Russia (N = 2,350), we show that, in general, encounters with corruption in the public sector are associated with citizens’ lower trust of their government. At the same time, we theorize two caveats that attenuate this relationship, contributing to inconsistent findings in previous studies. First, we find that the negative association between corruption and political trust is significantly weaker when such corruption is beneficial to ordinary people. Second, citizens tend to “penalize” local rather than central government officials, which, we argue, is a result of top leaders’ ability to manipulate public discourse around corruption.