Corruption and support for decentralisation

Abstract

Existing explanations of individual preferences for decentralisation and secession focus on collective identity, economic considerations and party politics. This paper contributes to this literature by showing that preferences for fiscal and political decentralisation are also driven by concern about the quality of government in the face of corruption. It makes two claims. Firstly, information on national-level corruption decreases satisfaction with national politicians, and subsequently increases preferences for decentralisation and secession. Secondly, information on regional-level corruption pushes citizens of highly corrupt regions to prefer national retrenchment and unitary states. The effects of this political compensation mechanism crosscut national identities and involve regions that are not ethnically or economically different from the core. We test our argument using a survey experiment in Spain and confirm its cross-national generalisability with data from the European Values Study.

The unstudied effects of wording and answer formats in the analysis of impartiality in public service provision

“…The authors finally noted that citizens perceive EU institutions as less corrupt than national institutions in contexts where the overall QoG is low, and in line with the "trade-off" hypothesis, citizens preferred centralised policies. Similarly, in a study conducted in Spain, Kuhn & Pardos-Prado [ 30 ] stated that corruption and the QoG in different geographical settings are key determinants of preferences for more or less decentralisation. They found that corruption at the national level decreases satisfaction with national policies, increasing preferences for decentralisation and secessionist self-determination [ 31 ] leading citizens in highly corrupt regions to prefer reducing the national domains of unitary states.…”