Contrasting "the pure people" with "the corrupt elite" is a prominent rhetorical figure of populist radical right parties and their proponents. However, scholars rarely consider political corruption as an explanatory factor for the electoral success of this party family. This study investigates the role of individual corruption experience in dealing with public officials for radical right party support in 12 European countries. As central argument, we contend that the relationship between corruption experience and voting radical right is essentially mediated by citizens' trust in public officials and political institutions. The empirical results support this argument, showing that exposure to corruption diminishes political trust which in turn leads to a higher propensity to vote for a radical right party. Additionally, we provide insight about country-specific factors that moderate the individual-level relationships. We find that the eroding effect of corruption experience on trust in public officials is less severe in contexts of low institutional quality. Moreover, radical right parties are particularly able to mobilize support from distrusting voters when in opposition.

We draw attention to a simple yet underappreciated way of forecasting the outcomes of elections involving two rounds of voting: surveying the voters' candidate evaluations in first round exit polls, poststratifying the sample proportions of reported votes to official first round election returns, and redistributing the votes for eliminated competitors according to their supporters' lower-order preferences among the viable alternatives in round two. We argue that the approach is likely to outperform standard pre-election surveys, due to its better coverage and reduced measurement error, and the possibility of correcting for sample selection. We set out the practical details of the method and demonstrate its usefulness by employing a recent German mayoral election as an empirical case. Thirteen candidates were competing in the first round, while there were six candidates in the decisive second round. The runoff result was forecast two weeks in advance with an average absolute error of less than one percentage point.

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