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the rise of valence political campaigning
LUIGI CURINI
Corruption, Ideology, and Populism
Luigi Curini
Corruption, Ideology,
and Populism
The Rise of Valence Political Campaigning
Luigi Curini
Department of Social and Political Sciences
The University of Milan
Milan, Italy
ISBN 978-3-319-56734-1 ISBN 978-3-319-56735-8 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56735-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017946849
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Contents
1 Political Corruption and Valence Issues 1
2 The Ideological Incentive for Campaigning on

Corruption Issues: The Two-Party Case 29
3 The Ideological Incentive to Campaign on

Corruption Issues: The Multi-party Case 81
4 The Direction of Valence Campaigning in

Two Dimensions 117
5 What Implications? 147
References 183
Index 205
v
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Number of books and articles referring to corruption in

either the text or title per 100 books and articles on politics 2
Fig. 1.2 Average emphasis on CORRUPTION in parties’ manifestoes
over decades 7
Fig. 1.3 Contrasting the CPI index with CORRUPTION across
country-year elections 10
Fig. 1.4 Policy vs. valence issues in terms of voters’ distribution
of preferences with respect to such issues 13
Fig. 2.1 Electors’ utility and parties’ votes in a left-to-right policy space 35
Fig. 2.2 Valence superiority of party L k is responsible for its increased
support (z* − z´)36
Fig. 2.3 Greater importance of non-policy valence issues on votes
(left) when party ideal points are close to one another, lesser
importance when parties are distant (right) 38
Fig. 2.4 Party L’s incentive to campaign on non-policy valence issues
grows hyperbolically as the distance between parties decreases 39
Fig. 2.5 Relationship between SPATIAL PRESSURE and
CORRUPTION in US parties’ manifestoes (1920–2012) 43
Fig. 2.6 Italy: emphasis on CORRUPTION by PCI/PDS and the
evolution of SPATIAL PRESSURE: 1948–1992 (left panel);
Japan: emphasis on CORRUPTION by JSP and the evolution
of SPATIAL PRESSURE: 1960–1993 (right panel) 51
Fig. 2.7 Emphasis on CORRUPTION by PCI/PDS and the
Evolution of SPATIAL PRESSURE between PCI/PDS
and DC (DC-PSI since 1983) over the Italian post-war
period—using legislative speeches 57
vii
viii List of Figures
Fig. 2.8 Party L’s incentive to compete on valence depends on the

variable d and on the parameter a68
Fig. 3.1 Small k values (with respect to d1 and d2) reduce party C’s
support and leaves party R’s (left) unchanged. Larger k values
completely extinguish party C’s support and reduce party
R’s (right) (dashed curves: voters’ utility for L when k > 0)84
Fig. 3.2 Votes obtained by the centrist party C before (left panel)
and after (right panel) successful positive valence campaigning 85
Fig. 3.3 Party C’s incentive to campaign on non-policy valence issues
is a function of two variables d1 and d2 (where d1 + d2 =
constant)86
Fig. 3.4 How to estimate the value of SPATIAL PRESSURE:
a five-party system example 92
Fig. 3.5 Box plots of the emphasis on CORRUPTION in parties’
manifestos over party status (incumbent vs. opposition
parties (left panel), mainstream vs. new parties (right panel))93
Fig. 3.6 The impact of POSITION on the expected value of
CORRUPTION (left panel) and its marginal effect
(right panel)99
Fig. 3.7 Marginal impact of increasing SPATIAL PRESSURE from
its median to its 90th percentile on the relative value of
CORRUPTION for different values of VOTE at STAKE 102
Fig. 3.8 The average emphasis on COMPETENCE in the Italian
Legislative speeches over time 107
Fig. 3.9 The ideological space during the Fanfani III investiture
debate (1960) 107
Fig. 3.10 Contrasting CPI index with country fixed-effects coefficients
(as they arise from Model 1, Table 3.2) 112
Fig. 4.1 The two-dimensional German policy space for the 2014
European election. 119
Fig. 4.2 A two-party system in which party K displays the same
valence advantage: party J and K distant from each other
(left panel) or closer to each other (right panel)122
Fig. 4.3 Share of NVC, PVC, and OVC tweets: overall (left panel)
and by country (right panel)128
Fig. 4.4 The spatial position of parties in the 2014 European
elections131
Fig. 4.5 Plot of (1/d1 + 1/d2) for party C132
Fig. 5.1 The overall trend of POLARIZATION, SPATIAL
PRESSURE, and CORRUPTION by elections over decades 150
List of Figures
ix
Fig. 5.2 The ideological-valence loop 169

Fig. 5.3 Tag-clouds of the tweets posted in the official Twitter
account of Hillary Clinton (left panel) and Donald Trump
(right panel) during the last 2 months of the electoral
campaign 2016 171
List of Tables
Table 1.1 A typology of campaign issues 17

Table 2.1 Explaining CORRUPTION in the US cases according to
SPATIAL PRESSURE 45
Table 2.2 Explaining the incentives of the largest opposition party to
emphasize CORRUPTION using the Italian and Japanese
CMP data 53
Table 2.3 Explaining the incentives of the PCI/PDS to emphasize
CORRUPTION (1946–1994) 59
Table 2.4 The 26 CMP categories used to estimate a left and a
right position 69
Table 2.5 Explaining CORRUPTION in the US case according
to SPATIAL PRESSURE (using alternative estimations
of party left-right scores from CMP data) 71
Table 3.1 Countries, number of elections, and electoral manifestos
included in the analysis, temporal range, average value of
CORRUPTION, and corresponding standard deviation 89
Table 3.2 The determinants of the emphasis on CORRUPTION in
party manifestos 96
Table 3.3 Average percentage emphasis per Italian party on
COMPETENCE (1946–2014) 106
Table 3.4 The determinants of the emphasis on COMPETENCE
in Italian legislative speeches 109
Table 4.1 Explaining the share of NVC and PVC in the 2014
European elections 134
Table 4.2 Explaining the share of NVC and PVC in the 2014
European elections—robustness checks 135
xi
xii List of Tables
Table 4.3 List of parties and Twitter accounts, number of tweets

downloaded, and date of election 139
Table 4.4 Percentage of (positive and negative) tweets related to
non-policy valence issues (first column) and either positional
or non-positional policy issues (second column) in the 2014
European elections 140
Table 5.1 Summarizing the impact of SPATIAL PRESSURE on
non-policy valence issues 148
Table 5.2 The impact of DECADES on the average value of SPATIAL
PRESSURE over elections 151
Table 5.3 Comparison between actual and expected values
according to Table 2.3 results (in brackets the 95%
confidence interval): the Oil scandal, Clean hands, and
three counterfactual scenarios in the Italian First Republic 158
Table 5.4 Explaining the choice of ANTI ESTABLISHMENT 163
Introduction
A large body of analysis published in recent decades has shown that politi-
cal campaigns are important (Farrell and Schmitt-Beck 2002; Sides 2007).
This is not surprising: political campaigns have the power to arouse atten-
tion, shape and reframe ideas, activate citizens, and, eventually, place con-
testants ahead in the electoral race (Nai and Walter 2015). But campaigns
are also about positioning and highlighting issues on the political agenda.
Political corruption, as will be discussed at length throughout this book,
is one of the issues that parties can put forward during such electoral
events. Broadly defined as the use of political power for illegal personal
gains, corruption is a phenomenon that has been frequently investigated
in the literature. Many researchers have attributed it to various causes.
Most studies show, for example, that established democracies are greatly
affected by political corruption, but they are so to a lesser extent than non-
or proto-democratic states, while rules and traditions matter in determin-
ing the level of political corruption. However, these studies do not identify
the conditions under which political corruption can be expected to play
a significant role in political confrontation. Do parties talk about corrup-
tion only as a by-product of occasional exogenous factors (i.e. scandals
reported in the press) or are they induced to do so by systemic regularities?
And what are the broad consequences?
These are the research questions addressed by the present book. To
deal with them, I shall link political corruption to the growing literature
on valence issues (Stokes 1963), given that political corruption and hon-
esty are possibly the most prominent examples of what are commonly
understood to be non-policy valence issues (Stokes 1992) (Chap. 1).
xiii
xiv INTRODUCTION
Then, from a theoretical point of view, I shall use a straightforward spatial

model to link the incentives of parties to highlight corruption issues in
their electoral confrontation with ideological considerations.
Almost 60 years ago, Daniel Bell (1960) made the provocative claim
that ideological polarization was diminishing in Western democracies: ‘in
the Western world there is a rough consensus among intellectuals on polit-
ical issues: the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentral-
ized power; a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism. In that
sense, the ideological age has ended’ (Bell 1960: 373). Forty years later,
Francis Fukuyama (1989) pushed the ‘end of ideology’ mantra even fur-
ther by talking explicitly about the ‘end of history’. With the demise of the
Cold War, he argued all large ideological conflicts had been resolved. The
contest was over, and history had produced a winner: Western-style lib-
eral democracy. Since then, other far-reaching processes such as European
integration and globalization, with the connected erosion of domestic
sovereignty and reduced policy options available to national leaders, have
worked in the same direction, further restricting the ideological menu
from which parties can choose their positions vis-à-vis each other and the
voters during an electoral campaign.
According to the model presented in this book, these macro trends are
likely to have a major impact on the motivations of parties to discuss (or
not) political corruption. It will be shown, in fact, that the incentives of
political actors to highlight the valence issue of corruption increase as the
spatial distance separating a party from its ideologically adjacent competi-
tors decreases. Intuitively, this happens because when parties are adjacent
from a spatial point of view, praising one’s own policy position or criticiz-
ing that of the other party is tantamount to praising the other’s position
and criticizing one’s own because the two positions are so similar. Thus, a
higher degree of ideological party similarity incentivizes parties to find dif-
ferent means to distinguish themselves before the electorate so that voters
are induced to support them (and not the others). Investing in a valence
campaign based on a non-policy valence issue such as corruption provides
parties with that opportunity.
This result applies, with relatively small qualitative differences, in
both a two-party system (Chap. 2) and a multi-party one (Chap. 3) on
considering one or two dimensions of political confrontation (Chap. 4)
and regardless (with some caveats) of the direction of valence campaign-
ing (i.e. purely negative, as occurs when a party accuses other parties of
being corrupt, or positive, as when a party praises itself for being honest).
INTRODUCTION
xv
Finally, what is true for a particular non-policy valence issue like corrup-
tion applies in principle to any other non-policy valence issue, as will be
discussed below.
In what follows, the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between the
distance of a party from its ideologically adjacent competitors (i.e. its
‘neighbours’) and its incentive to campaign on political corruption will
be tested in a variety of contexts (ranging from a longitudinal case study
centred on Italy to a comparative study focused on both national and
European elections) while drawing on various sources of data (such as leg-
islative speeches, party manifestoes, and social media tweets). This will be
done by following an incremental pathway that adds a layer of complexity
in each successive chapter compared to the previous one.
In the final chapter (Chap. 5), the general consequences of the previous
findings will be discussed by connecting them to three main topics. First,
it will be shown how these results can be directly related to the litera-
ture on political (and electoral) accountability. Second, the model based
on ideological considerations will be extended to illustrate how it helps
explain the anti-elite rhetoric of parties generally connected to what can be
identified as a ‘populist strategy’. Third, and finally, the theoretical points
discussed will be related to well-established theorizing on parties and party
systems, in particular with the cartel party theory. The book will finish
by highlighting an unfortunate trade-off: while a long list of works have
thoroughly discussed the risks of a wide ideological polarization for the
everyday life of a polity, the possible negative externalities of an extreme
valence campaign generated by a short ideological distance among parties
have been generally underestimated. However, it will be argued, this is an
important issue for contemporary democracies.
This book would have been impossible to write without my frequent
discussions with Paolo Martelli over the years. What I have learnt about the
‘power of valence issues’ is entirely due to his guidance. I have discussed
earlier versions of some of the chapters of this book at several conferences
and seminars: among others, the annual meeting of the Italian Political
Science Association (SISP), Rome, September 2009; the congress of the
European Political Science Association (EPSA), Berlin, June 2012; the
New Developments in Modeling Party Competition Conference, Berlin,
July 2012; GLOPE2 Tuesday Seminars, Waseda University (Tokyo), 2012
and 2013; and the 8th ECPR General Conference, Glasgow, September
2014. I acknowledge all the helpful comments made by seminars’ partici-
pants and in particular by Luca Verzichelli, Willy Jou, Susumu Shikano,
xvi INTRODUCTION
Róbert Veszteg, and Aiji Tanaka. I am grateful to Samuel Merrill III for
some very useful suggestions with respect to the theoretical model pre-
sented in Chap. 3. Andrea Ceron and Stefano Iacus have been extremely
helpful for several reasons, just too many to count them. The month that
I spent in the United States in the summer of 2016 for the International
Visiting Leadership Program, as well as the two following months at
Waseda University in Tokyo, helped me greatly in drafting the present
book. I thank the US Department of State and the US Consulate of Milan
for the former opportunity, and the support (and the friendship) of Airo
Hino for the latter. Finally, my special thanks go to my parents (Carla and
Germano) as well as to my family: Masha, Davide, and Alice were just
fantastic during the months I spent with my laptop rather than with them.
They showed a lot of patience to me. This book is dedicated to them.
I also acknowledge the following sources of financial support: the
Italian Ministry for Research and Higher Education, Prin 2007, prot.
2007 scrwt4, and Prin 2009, prot. 2009 TPW4NL_002; the Japan Society
for the Promotion of Science, grant numbers S-09131 and S-12123; the
Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS) fellowship, Tokyo, 2014; and
the Global COE (Center of Excellence) Program for Political Economy
of Institutional Construction (GLOPE II) (Waseda University) fellowship
(both in 2009 and 2011).
All data and scripts to replicate the analyses reported in each chapter
of the present book are available online at: http://www.luigicurini.com/
scientific-publications.html.
References
Bell, D. (1960). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in

the Fifties. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Farrell, D. M., & Schmitt-Beck, R. (Eds.). (2002). Do Political Campaigns
Matter? Campaign Effects in Elections and Referendums. New York:
Routledge.
Fukuyama, F. (1989). The End of History? National Interest, 16(Summer),
3–18.
Nai, A., & Walter, A. S. (Eds.). (2015). New Perspectives on Negative
Campaigning: Why Attack Politics Matters. Colchester: ECPR Press.
INTRODUCTION
xvii
Sides, J. (2007). The Consequences of Campaign Agendas. American

Politics Research, 35(4), 465–488.
Stokes, D. E. (1963). Spatial Models of Party Competition. American
Political Science Review, 57, 368–377.
Stokes, D. E. (1992). Valence Politics. In: D. Kavanagh (Ed.), Electoral
Politics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
CHAPTER 1
Political Corruption and Valence Issues
This chapter links the literature on political corruption with that on valence
issues. It will discuss how the former literature has generally sought to
understand the consequences of political corruption, as well as the rea-
sons for its diffusion in different countries, while discarding (with few
exceptions) the factors that could explain why political actors may have an
incentive to campaign (in a stronger or weaker way) on political corrup-
tion issues. By doing so, the possibility of investigating the outcomes of
the choice to ‘invest in corruption’ is precluded. I will argue that looking
at political corruption using the framework provided by the valence issues
literature helps fill this gap.
In this regard, I will present the different interpretation of the concept
of valence issues first introduced into the literature by Stokes’s seminal
article (1963), focusing in particular on the distinction between non-
positional policy-based valence issues (e.g. issues such as reducing crime
or increasing economic growth) and non-policy-based ones (e.g. credibil-
ity, integrity) (Clark 2014). In contrast to positional policy issues, which
involve a clear conflict of interest among groups of electors (being in
favour of or against the welfare state, gay marriage, and so on), when deal-
ing with either policy or non-policy valence issues, voters hold identical
positions (preferring more to less or less to more, depending on the issue).
Corruption (honesty) is a typical example of a non-policy valence issue.
I will then highlight how the aforementioned types of valence issues,
together with positional policy issues, can be viewed and analysed
within a common theoretical framework that differentiates the possible
© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. Curini, Corruption, Ideology, and Populism,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56735-8_1
2 1 POLITICAL CORRUPTION AND VALENCE ISSUES
c ampaigning moves available to political actors (candidates and/or par-

ties) according to two simple criteria.
This latter point leads directly to the connection between political cor-
ruption and valence issues that will be theoretically and empirically investi-
gated in the following chapters. To anticipate an aspect thoroughly discussed
below, if political corruption is treated as a valence issue, it becomes pos-
sible to focus on how parties’ relative ideological positions and electoral
considerations affect their emphasis on campaigning on corruption.
1.1 The Growing Interest in Corruption

Since the mid-1990s, from leading international organizations, such as the
EU and OECD, to international media and individual governments, the
topic of corruption has become almost ubiquitous in policy circles. The
debate on corruption has not taken place only in the public domain, how-
ever, because also academic attention to it has grown considerably over
the years. This becomes apparent on conducting a simple bibliometric
check. The scores reported in Fig. 1.1 are based, respectively, on a Google
Number of articles referring to corruption

in either the text or title by 100 articles on politics
% of articles referring to corruption
.05 .1
0 .15 .2
1950–60 1961–70 1971–80 1981–90 1991–00 2001–10 2011–16
Jstor: references to corruption in the text

Google Scholar: references to corruption in the title
Data source: Jstor & Google Scholar
Fig. 1.1 Number of books and articles referring to corruption in either the text
or title per 100 books and articles on politics
1.1 THE GROWING INTEREST IN CORRUPTION 3
Scholar and a Jstor search query. The number of books and articles refer-
ring to corruption among all political science publications grown linearly
over time, rising from 2% in the 1950s to 10.8% in the past 5 years (source:
Jstor).1 The same significant growth is found when focusing on the pro-
portion of books and articles with the word ‘corruption’ in their title
among all publications on politics: from 0.5% in the 1950s to 15% once
again in the last 5 years (source Google Scholar).2
This growing interest is not surprising: corruption directly impacts on
such important matters as fairness in the institutional and economic pro-
cess, political accountability, responsiveness, etc. According to well-known
definitions, corruption is ‘the misuse of public office for private gains’
(Treisman 2000: 399) or, also, ‘an act by (or with acquiescence of) a pub-
lic official’ that violates legal or social norms for private or particularist
gain (Gerring and Thacker 2004: 300). In both definitions, public officials
are the main actors, while the extent and type of corruption are not speci-
fied (Ecker et al. 2016). Moreover, political elites may be held accountable
not just for their own abuse of power and money but also for failing to
limit corrupt behaviour in general (Tavits 2007).
Della Porta and Vannucci’s (1997: 231–232) definition of corrup-
tion centres on another recurrent theme in the literature: the breach of a
principal-agent relationship. For Della Porta and Vannucci, political cor-
ruption involves a secret violation of a contract that, implicitly or explic-
itly, delegates responsibility and the exercise of discretionary power to an
agent (i.e. the politicians) who, against the interests or preferences of the
principal (i.e. the citizens), acts in favour of a third party, from which it
receives a reward.
The literature on corruption has mainly focused on two sub-topics.
The first concerns the consequences of corruption. A wide-ranging and
multi-disciplinary literature has shown that contexts which suffer from
higher levels of corruption are associated with, for example, poorer health
(Holmberg and Rothstein 2012) and environmental outcomes (Welsch
2004), lower economic development (Mauro 1995; Shleifer and Vishny
1993), and greater income inequality (Gupta et al. 2002). Moreover, it
has also been underlined that corruption is a problem that plagues both
developing and more economically developed regions such as Europe
(Charron et al. 2014).
The political consequences of corruption have also been well-
documented. Corruption undermines legitimacy in a variety of institutional
settings (Mishler and Rose 2001; Seligson 2002). In particular, corruption
destabilizes the democratic rules by favouring some groups—especially
the wealthy—over others (Engler 2016; Anderson and Tverdova 2003),

thereby generating mistrust between the majority of citizens and their
political leaders. Similarly, Rothstein and Uslaner (2005) have shown that
corruption exacerbates social inequality, which in turn reduces people’s
social trust, while Kostadinova (2012) found that corruption lowers
trust not only in the government and public administration but also in
parliament and political parties in general. Widespread corruption also
depresses electoral turnout, because high levels of perceived corruption
lead to more negative evaluations of political authorities and the
political system in general (Anderson and Tverdova 2003; McCann and
Dominguez 1998).3
Finally, corruption has a possible impact on the vote-choice of citi-
zens. According to democratic theory, one key mechanism through
which citizens can combat corrupt elite behaviour is electoral choice.
Given pervasive corruption among incumbents, or if a corruption scan-
dal breaks prior to an election, voters who understand the costs of
corruption should turn against the government in favour of a cleaner
challenger and ‘throw the rascals out’ (Charron and Bågenholm 2016).
In this respect, recent findings demonstrate that if corruption is per-
ceived to be high, the electoral support for governing parties decreases
(Klašnja et al. 2016; Krause and Méndez 2009). Similarly, several stud-
ies have found that the electorate actually punishes politicians and par-
ties involved in corruption scandals (Clark 2009), while corruption
allegations appear to harm the electoral prospects of the accused politi-
cians (Peters and Welch 1980; Ferraz and Finan 2008). However, there
is no lack of exceptions to this rule, since many voters still remain
loyal to their preferred parties. For example, recent empirical stud-
ies have shown that the accountability mechanisms are less decisive in
their impact, because corrupt officials in many cases are re-elected or
punished only marginally by voters (Chang et al. 2010; Reed 1999;
Bågenholm 2013). This may be because at least some voters personally
benefit from the corrupt activities, for example in the form of clien-
telism (Fernández-Vázquez et al. 2016; Manzetti and Wilson 2007),
or because citizens have strong loyalties to certain politicians or par-
ties, so that a corruption scandal is not enough to change their voting
behaviour (de Sousa and Moriconi 2013). Moreover, what really mat-
ters in some instances is not how corrupt a given party is perceived to
be, but whether it is deemed to be more corrupt than the other parties
(Cordero and Blais 2017).
1.1 THE GROWING INTEREST IN CORRUPTION 5
Because the corruption issue is so important for its economic and polit-
ical consequences, it is no surprise that understanding the causes of the
phenomenon has garnered a great deal of recent scholarly attention as
well. Most analyses of the causes of corruption start from the presumption
that the abuse of public office for private gain stems from voters’ inability
to rein in their representatives. In the face of government malfeasance,
scholars ask whether and how political institutions (but also political cul-
ture and the level of economic development: see Lipset and Lenz 2000;
Montinola and Jackman 2002) affect it. Answers in the literature generally
agree that corruption is lowest where political institutions give voters the
ability to punish politicians who fail to perform according to expectations.
In regard to the already-discussed principal-agent perspective, researchers
often highlight the role and the importance of political competition (Alt
and Lassen 2003) as measured through the existence of partisan and insti-
tutional checks in limiting agents’ (i.e. politicians’) discretion to act on
their own behalf. However, given that with no reliable information about
whom to check and when, the ability to keep agents in check (and thereby
avoid a moral hazard problem) is hugely hampered; good government
requires also that those who would like to see corruption punished are in
a position to observe, report, or block undesirable behaviour (Brown et al.
2011). These elements—effective monitoring and institutional checks—
are in fact fundamental to well-designed principal-agent relationships
(Heller et al. 2016).
Montinola and Jackman (2002) and Charron and Lapuente (2010) have
looked at how the level of democracy affects this principal-agent problem.
Most studies show that established democracies are greatly affected by
political corruption, but they are so to a lesser extent than non- or proto-
democratic states, while also rules and traditions matter in determining the
level of political corruption. Chang (2005), Kunicova and Rose-Ackerman
(2005), and Chang and Golden (2006) examine how electoral rules affect
how political candidates can be held accountable to voters. Tavits (2007)
shows that the principle-agent relationship is tightened in the presence
of clear lines of responsibility for enacting anti-corruption policies. The
same happens if institutions such as parliaments, press freedom, and a free
economy are in place (Bohara et al. 2004; Gerring and Thacker 2004).
Finally, Andrews and Montinola (2004) suggest that increasing the total
number of veto players in a democracy makes collusion more difficult and
reduces actors’ capacity to collude to accept bribes, which in turn should
reduce corruption, at least in some given circumstances.4
1.2 Politicizing Corruption

As just seen, the topic of corruption has generated a massive amount of
literature, both in and outside the academic field. However, with very few
exceptions, analysing the reasons that could explain why political actors
may have an incentive to campaign on political corruption issues has not
received similar attention. This is surprising, since many new political par-
ties which outperformed the political establishment in the past prominently
politicised corruption (Hanley and Sikk 2014). For example, Bågenholm
and Charron (2014) have shown in a study covering both Western and
Eastern European countries that new political parties that do politicise
corruption are more successful than new parties that do not. In terms of
the electoral effects of politicising corruption, the two authors find that,
even when controlling for a country’s level of corruption, unemployment,
inflation, electoral institutions, and history of democracy, when this tactic
is used by new parties or parties in the main opposition, it leads to greater
vote gains compared with the previous election than for the same type of
party that refrains from this strategy. On average, politicising corruption
increases a party’s vote share by about 5.6% compared with the previous
election. Such evidence suggests that there is ample opportunity to politi-
cise corruption as a campaign issue.
However, the degree of attention paid to corruption by both main-
stream as well as new parties is something that changes over time in a
quite striking manner. To anticipate some data that will be discussed at
length in the next chapters, Fig. 1.2 reports the average degree of atten-
tion to corruption issues (which I label CORRUPTION) paid by parties
in their electoral manifestos since 1945 until today in 42 democracies and
554 elections as recorded by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP)
dataset.5
Before beginning discussion of Fig. 1.2, it is important to point out
that emphasizing corruption in a political confrontation (i.e. politicizing
it) can be done in two different ways (see Bågenholm and Charron 2014).
First, it can be addressed in general terms, so that parties raise the issue
and suggest ways to deal with the problem, without making any explicit
references to the other parties or politicians. Second, corruption may be
politicised in more specific terms by accusing one’s political adversaries
of being corrupt. However, by focusing on manifestoes as codified by
CMP in Fig. 1.2, the two types of politicization are not distinguished,
which means that all forms of corruption rhetoric by parties in the election
1.2 POLITICIZING CORRUPTION 7
.017
Emphasis on Corruption
.006
40s 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s

Decades
avg. Corruption emphasis mean +/- half sd Linear fit
Data source: CMP (version 2016a)
Fig. 1.2 Average emphasis on CORRUPTION in parties’ manifestoes over

decades
c ampaign are counted as politicisation of the issue (see Chaps. 2 and 3 for
more details on this aspect).
In the CMP dataset, electoral programmes are coded by content analy-
sis, i.e. by manually computing all occurrences of expressions with com-
municative meaning chosen among a predetermined list of topics. In other
words, the coding procedures used by CMP involve sorting all politically
meaningful expressions in each party’s manifesto into a group of categories
(welfare, defence, law and order, etc.), and then taking the percentages in
each category as a measure of the party’s priorities (Budge et al. 2001).
Among these categories, ‘political corruption’ (per304 to use the CMP
denomination) explicitly includes all references to the need to eliminate cor-
ruption and associated abuse in political and public life. Accordingly, only
campaigns carried forward by parties with respect to ‘grand corruption’—
that is, corruption involving politicians and political parties—are anal-
ysed. CMP data do not enable a distinction to be drawn between ‘grand’
and ‘petty’ bureaucratic corruption cases, so that this difference, possibly
important in some cases, is inevitably overlooked in the analysis.
There follow some examples of sentences dealing explicitly with cor-

ruption in party manifestoes and that show the large variety of political
references to the phenomenon6: ‘Corporations and governments must
behave ethically in all transactions and work to prevent corruption’ (a sen-
tence included in the Australian Green Party manifesto of 2010); ‘We
will support partner Governments and civil societies in their fight against
corruption’ (Fine Gael 2007 manifesto); ‘Transparency International
has observed that the numerous agencies in government responsible for
minimising corruption represent a problem’ (New Zealand Māori party
2011 manifesto); ‘Money has been used on a racial basis and squandered
in corruption and bureaucracy’ (African National Congress 1994 party
manifesto); ‘Reforms must protect consumers from abuse and reflect a
global commitment to end corruption’ (American Democratic Party 2012
manifesto); and ‘Yet censorship and self-censorship are still rife, and the
threat of prosecution can have a chilling effect on the willingness of people
to speak out against injustice and corruption’ (British Liberal Democratic
party 2015 manifesto).
Let us return to Fig. 1.2. As can be seen, corruption as a campaign
issue has increased in use over decades: the correlation over time between
CORRUPTION and decades is, in fact, .81 (significant at the .01 level).
Focusing on a different data source (information on politicisation of cor-
ruption collected from election reports in political science journals) and
on a smaller sample concerning only European democracies from 1981 to
2011, the already-mentioned paper by Bågenholm and Charron (2014)
finds a similar result. This is reassuring about the robustness of what is
reported in Fig. 1.2.
In substantive terms, the emphasis placed by parties on corruption in
their manifestos is also far from being negligible. The overall average value
of CORRUPTION in the entire sample on which Fig. 1.2 is based is
.017 (i.e. 1.17% of all quasi-sentences in manifestoes are devoted to politi-
cal corruption). On comparing this value with other politically relevant
categories included in the CMP dataset, it can be concluded that parties
discuss corruption in their manifestoes more frequently than, for example,
economic planning (per404 referring to the CMP denomination), nation-
alization (per412), controlled economy (per413), criticizing the military
(per105), praising constitutionalism (per203), attacking multiculturalism
(per608), or discussing peace (per106).
Figure 1.2, moreover, conveys a second important piece of information:
if, as just noted, parties tend to highlight CORRUPTION to an increasing
extent over time, the significant variance of attention to that issue remains
quite substantial throughout the time period considered, meaning that
there are always some parties that tend to talk substantially more (or
substantially less) about corruption than the average. This prompts the
following question: given the considerable variance in the emphasis on
corruption just observed, under what conditions is the electoral strategy
of politicizing corruption more easily employed? For example, do parties
talk about corruption as a by-product of contextual exogenous factors
(such as a higher level of corruption in a given country)?
To investigate this possibility further, I need a measure able to estimate
the severity of corruption in each country over time. Until the 1990s,
empirical research in the field of corruption consisted primarily of case
studies. Since then, however, a number of corruption indices have been
developed by different sources and institutions. They have transformed
the study of corruption and enabled social scientists to test a num-
ber of hypotheses on both its causes and its consequences. One of the
most commonly used indicators of political corruption is Transparency
International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI).
This index represents a ‘poll of polls’ constructed by a team of research-
ers at Göttingen University using information from a number of individual
surveys of businesspersons or local populations of the relevant countries,
as well as several ratings by economic risk analysts and country experts.7
It has been produced annually since 1995, with country coverage varying
as available data sources have changed: for the 2015 index, for example,
167 countries were rated.8 The rankings from each of these sources are
standardized and then averaged to derive a composite country rating out
of 10. Averaging should reduce the impact of idiosyncratic coding by indi-
vidual ratings of organizations. The CPI is generally considered the most
valid and reliable cross-national estimate of corruption, and it is there-
fore widely used in comparative studies (see Treisman 2000; Krause and
Mendez 2009; Choi and Woo 2010).9
In this regard, Fig. 1.3 contrasts the average emphasis on
CORRUPTION by parties running in the elections held from 1995 to
2015 with the corresponding country-CPI score in that same electoral
year (note that only the pool of democracies included in the CMP dataset
have been considered in this comparison). For example, in the case of the
Irish election held in June 1997, I consider the Irish CPI score in 1997.
As discussed, the CPI scale ranges between a maximum score (10), which
corresponds to low corruption levels, and a minimum score (0) indicating
.13
Japan 1996
.1
Emphasis on Corruption
Canada 2006
.05
Poland 2005
0
2 4 6 8 10
CPI
Country year-election Linear fit
Data source: CMP (version 2016a)
Fig. 1.3 Contrasting the CPI index with CORRUPTION across country-year
elections
high levels of corruption. The overall correlation between the two mea-
sures is significant but not impressively strong: −.48, i.e. as the level of
corruption in a given country-year is perceived to decrease according to
the CPI, so does CORRUPTION. One of the reasons for this limited cor-
relation is the different degree of ‘stickiness’ of the two variables. The CPI
is a measure relative stable over time in each country, contrary to what
happens with the emphasis on corruption by parties.10 For example, in the
case of the CPI, the intra-class correlation in the data (a measure stating
how much of the total variation in the CPI variable can be explained solely
by differences between countries) is .94. Hence almost 94% of the entire
variance in the CPI is explained by differences between countries alone. By
contrast, the intra-class correlation in the case of CORRUPION is .29. In
this case, in other words, more than 70% of the total variance in the vari-
able under scrutiny is due to overtime dynamics within the same country,
rather than simply to differences across countries.11
It therefore appears difficult to relate something that is relatively stable
within a country (the severity of corruption in each single country-year as
captured by the CPI) with the large variation over time within the same
country of CORRUPTION. In Fig. 1.3, for example, several cases present

a country year-election value of CORRUPTION that is larger than the
one expected according to the country-CPI value in that same year (i.e.
the Canadian election of 2006) or, vice versa, considerably smaller (i.e.
the Polish election of 2005: in a country that experiences major problems
in terms of corruption according to the CPI but wherein parties do not
discuss the topic to any great extent).
Corruption can therefore exist, also at an apparently high rate, in a soci-
ety without being politicized (see the above case of Poland in 2005). Vice
versa, even in societies where politics are perceived to be ‘clean’, parties
can politicize this issue, and the tactic has been used by parties in countries
like Canada, as just seen. This apparent contrast can be explained on
acknowledging that the choice of emphasizing corruption is taken delib-
erately by political actors, and not simply as an automatic product of con-
textual factors, such as media revealing corruption scandals, for example
(I will return to this point at length below).
There are in fact also some drawbacks to stressing political corruption
(see Bågenholm and Charron 2014). First, for this tactic to be effective,
it must be delivered by a credible messenger. For example, in a situa-
tion where all major parties are deeply corrupt and all of them benefit
from the system while taking turns in office, the likelihood that any one
of them would challenge the current order by highlighting corruption is
quite small. Politicians may turn a blind eye to the problem, knowing that
they all benefit from it or that they cannot do anything about it even if
they tried.
Moreover, as has been recently demonstrated (Kumlin and Esaiasson
2012), the overuse of scandals centred on the intentional exploitation of
corruption to collect votes can lead to what has been called a kind of
‘scandal fatigue’, whereby voters do not react to scandals in a meaningful
way. To make things even more complex in this regard, anti-corruption
rhetoric may also backfire in the sense that parties emphasising morality
and honesty will be more severely evaluated by the voters and, if they
fail to improve the situation or, even worse, engage in the same corrupt
behaviour once in office, the public’s judgement will most likely be puni-
tive. In short, there may be short-term electoral gains from politicising
corruption, but also some major drawbacks.
So when does the politicization of corruption apply? Under what condi-
tions are parties willing to campaign on corruption? The lack of attention
to determining the reasons why parties may have a stronger (or weaker)
incentive to highlight corruption issues in their public confrontation is

unfortunate because it precludes the possibility of investigating the impor-
tant, and as we will see in Chap. 5, quite far-reaching consequences of that
choice. Consideration of political corruption using the framework pro-
vided by the valence issues literature helps to fill this apparent void.
1.3 What Is Meant by ‘Valence Issues’?

Spatial theory was launched by Anthony Downs in his now classic book
(Downs 1957) and today comprises a large body of literature. The exam-
ples that Downs provides of party competition refer to conflicts of inter-
est among groups of electors, as represented by their different positions
in the policy space. Stated informally (but see Chap. 2 on this), spatial
theory asserts that each voter’s utility decreases with the distance between
his/her preferred programme (his/her ideal point) and the locations of
parties’ (candidates’) proposals; accordingly, people vote for the party (or
candidate) with which they most agree on the issues of the day. Issues that
matter are those on which voters have differing opinions, i.e. the issues
have a ‘pro-con quality’ that divides the electorate. Taxation is the arche-
typal spatial issue, since some voters prefer to pay lower taxes even if this
means cuts in public services, whereas others are willing to accept higher
taxation if it produces better public services. Since the political parties
take differing stances on what constitutes an optimal mix of taxation and
public spending, the tax-spend tradeoff is a classic spatial issue. Similarly,
issues such as foreign policy, immigration controls, abortion, and gay and
lesbian marriage are positional policy issues upon which public opinion is
deeply divided and ‘parties or leaders are differentiated by their advocacy
of alternative positions’ (Stokes 1992: 143).
However, positional policy issues by no means exhaust all the aspects
of electoral competition. Over the years, this has been well established
by studies underlining the importance of factors such as ‘party identifica-
tion’ (Campbell et al. 1960; Budge et al. 1976), and ‘personalisation of
politics’ (Kaase 1994; Mughan 2000). One way to manage the complexity
of electoral competition is to point out that electors not only assess candi-
dates and parties’ positions in the policy space, but also judge candidates
and parties’ qualities (faults) corresponding to commonly shared values
(disvalues). In Stokes (1963: 373), a distinction is drawn between ‘posi-
tion issues’, which involve support of government actions from a set of
alternatives over which a distribution of voter preferences is defined, and
1.3 WHAT IS MEANT BY ‘VALENCE ISSUES’? 13
‘valence issues’, defined as ‘those that merely involve the linking of the
parties with some condition that is positively or negatively valued by the
electorate’. Valence issues are those where there is (virtually) no disagree-
ment, on which parties ‘are differentiated not by what they advocate but
by the degree to which they are linked in the public’s mind with condi-
tions or goals or symbols of which almost everyone approves or disap-
proves’ (Stokes 1992: 143). In the language of spatial models, valence
issues are ones with very widely shared ‘ideal points’: everyone has the
same preference with respect to them (Evans and Chzhen 2016; Whiteley
et al. 2016). Figure 1.4 gives a graphical representation of the distinc-
tion. The figure reports two possible examples of voters’ distribution with
respect to (positional) policy issues (unimodal or bimodal), together with
the expected distribution for a ‘valence’ issue, that is, an issue that is uni-
formly liked or disliked among the electorate, as opposed to a ‘position
issue’ on which opinion is divided.
Valence issues can be either policy-based or non-policy-based. For
example, increasing economic growth is a classic non-positional policy-
based valence issue since virtually everyone wants vigorous, sustainable
.4
.3
Density
.2
.1
0
Unimodal Policy Issue Bimodal Policy Issue

Valence Issue
Fig. 1.4 Policy vs. valence issues in terms of voters’ distribution of preferences
with respect to such issues
economic growth, preferring prosperity to stagnation. Hence they will

all support the party which they think can best deliver economic ‘good
times’, without presenting any distribution of preferences with respect to
that issue. Similarly, almost everyone wants affordable and effective public
services in areas such as education, health, transportation, and environ-
mental protection. Large majorities also demand protection from threats
to national and personal security posed by terrorists or common criminals.
The same applies to issues such as low rates of inflation or low unemploy-
ment (Whiteley et al. 2016).
The voluminous literature on the saliency theory approach (Budge and
Farlie 1983), as well on issue ownership (Petrocik 1996), focuses on such
policy-based valence issues. According to such studies, voters evaluate,
and parties/candidates compete, on the basis of which party/candidate
is considered ‘best able’ to handle a given issue (or set of issues), rather
than which of them has presented the policy position most proximate to
voters’ preferred policy positions (Clarke et al. 2004, 2009; Green 2007;
Green and Hobolt 2008; Pardos-Prado 2011). In this situation, debate is
about who is best able to deliver what everyone wants, rather than what
should be delivered. For all of these (policy-based) valence issues, there-
fore, what matters is ‘who can do it’, not ‘what should be done’ (Clarke
et al. 2010).12
Yet, in developing his original argument, Stokes (1963: 372) focuses
on a different set of valence issues, that is on non-policy-related factors
that can provide parties (or candidates) with an electoral advantage (or
disadvantage) independently of their policy positions (see Clark 2014
for a discussion in this regard). Among the examples that Stokes consid-
ers to explain the meaning of such non-policy valence issues (or ‘charac-
ter valence’ attributes, to use the terminology employed in Adams et al.
2011), political corruption stands out as one of the most prominent: ‘if
we are to speak of a dimension at all, both parties and all voters were
located at a single point: the position of virtue in government’ (Stokes
1963: 372).
The idea that political corruption epitomizes valence issues may be
challenged by claiming that voters in some cases make corrupt politicians
win elections (see the previous section on this point). This does not imply,
however, that a majority of voters prefer corrupt politicians to honest
ones. Rather, it means that voters generally compare candidates and par-
ties not only on corruption (as well as on other valence issues, such as
competence or charisma) but also on their proposed policy programme.
And it may well happen that a majority occasionally chooses a corrupt

politician if a more honest one supports political ideas that are too far from
its policy interests. For example, it may be the case that the government
is perceived to be doing a good job in managing the economy and that
voters reward the government for that rather than punishing it for being
corrupt (Charron and Bågenholm 2016; Choi and Woo 2010). In other
words, the usual clause ceteris paribus has to be applied to the assertion of
the universal preference for honest candidates.13
Stokes notes that the importance of corruption as a valence issue derives
from ‘how closely the rival parties are linked with the universally approved
symbol of honesty, and the universally disapproved symbol of dishonesty’
(Stokes 1992: 144). Accordingly, if office-holders are corrupt, there will
be calls to remove those individuals from office. However, the impact of
these calls will stem not from where the parties position themselves on a
scale ranging from ‘honesty’ to ‘dishonesty’ but on how closely the parties
are linked with the universally disapproved symbol of corruption (Stokes
1992: 144).
Besides corruption (and its opposite, i.e. honesty), other non-policy
valence issues highlighted in the literature refer to public goods such as
the reputations of candidates and parties for reliability and trustworthi-
ness, dedication to public service, integrity, and leadership ability, and
‘public evils’ such as incompetence.
Other authors sometimes include in the set of non-policy valence issues
also factors pertaining to the ‘incumbent advantage’, such as name rec-
ognition, fundraising and campaigning skills, or the ability to win ‘federal
pork’ for one’s district (Burden 2004; Fiorina 1981). Note, however, that
such attributes are non-spatial candidate advantages that are brought about
by the campaign context plausibly affecting candidates’ election prospects
but which the voters do not value for their own sake, contrary to non-
policy valence issues such as corruption or competence. Consequently, fol-
lowing Stone and Simas (2010), I argue that it is better from an analytical
point of view to differentiate the aforementioned two sets of non-policy
valence issues by attaching the label ‘campaign non-policy valence issues’
to the latter (Adams et al. 2011 use the label ‘strategic valence issues’ to
denote the same phenomenon), excluding them from the pool of non-
policy valence issues broadly understood.
Since the work of Stokes, the literature has begun to deal extensively
with valence issues to explain aspects of party competition that cannot be
dealt with by considering policy competition alone. To give a figure based
on a bibliometric search, the number of works discussing valence issues

within political science publications grew from 0.61% between 2001 and
2010 to 2.2% between 2011 and 2016 (source: Jstor).
Several authors have reported empirical research showing that political
parties or candidates widely viewed as competent, trustworthy, and char-
ismatic may enjoy election advantages not tied directly to the positions
that they take on positional dimensions. Indeed, extensive research docu-
ments the crucial importance of valence dimensions in shaping election
outcomes (Mondak 1995; Clarke et al. 2010; Clark 2009; Mondak 1995;
Abney et al. 2013; Green and Jennings 2012).
Other authors have variously extended their theoretical spatial mod-
els by showing how valence and positional policy issues should not be
considered as two separate domains. For example, Enelow and Hinich
(1982) integrate this concept within the framework of the spatial theory
of election, adding to voters’ utility function a term independent of the
programmatic/ideological preferences of voters and specific to parties and
candidates. As a result, if one candidate (or party) is seen as being, for
example, more honest and reliable than another, this valence premium
will convey an advantage. This formal representation of valence issues has
become the reference in the literature (see, e.g. Ansolabehere and Snyder
2000, Groseclose 2001, Aragones and Palfrey 2002, Adams et al. 2005,
Schofield and Sened 2006, Adams and Merrill 2013).
Most of these works deal with valence issues as exogenous elements
that electors can judge but parties cannot modify because they take them
directly from historical tradition or contingent fortune, whether they are
beneficial or detrimental in a given situation. However important, this
perspective on valence issues overlooks situations like that of a party that
cunningly chooses to agitate some topics shared in public opinion, thus
seizing the opportunity to champion a cause universally supported or to
rail against other parties’ misbehaviours. In this respect, for example, par-
ties may have an incentive to induce electors to focus on their intention
to behave honestly. Among issues that parties can undertake to improve
their value endowment, there is also the nomination of popular candi-
dates, whether their popularity stems from previous political activities
or from some other sources of social renown. Stokes has pointed out
the example of ‘the deftness with which Republican leaders turned the
changing concerns of the country to their advantage … by nominating
an immensely popular military figure [i.e., Dwight Eisenhower] who was
seen in wholly non-ideological terms’ (1963: 372). Conversely, a party
Table 1.1 A typology of campaign issues

Elector’s preference variability
YES NO
Parties’ choice YES Policy issues Non-policy-based valence issues

(on position, (e.g. socio-economic (e.g. nomination of popular
endowment, issues, foreign policy) candidates, discrediting the
reputation) opponent’s reputation)
NO Ascriptive issues Policy-based valence issues
(e.g. name, symbol, (e.g. reputation of being firmly
tradition) against inflation or pro welfare state)
can find it profitable to underline other parties’ alleged value failures, such
as economic incompetence, weakness against crime or terrorism, or, and
most notably for this book, corruption.
I maintain, therefore, that moves of this kind to collect votes by
exploiting the universal appeal of shared values can be frequent in party
competition or during political confrontations. This makes it possible to
develop a specific typology of campaigning issues that summarizes what
has been discussed thus far by means of two distinct analytic dimensions
(see Table 1.1).
The first dimension specifies that electors assess not only parties’ posi-
tions in policy space supporting voters’ various and differing interests but
also parties’ reputations concerning commonly shared values or policy
(i.e. non-policy as well as policy-based valence issues). Valence issues are
not, however, the same as non-policy issues, because there exist non-
policy issues that are not valence issues. Enelow and Hinich (1982) rec-
ognise this by introducing the concept of ‘ascriptive issues’, which are
those of the party’s characteristics that all electors describe in the same
way (i.e. perceive as objective attributes) but judge differently. Ascriptive
characteristics include all of a party’s references to its origin and history,
as well as to its position in respect to social cleavages. Regarding candi-
date’s characteristic, personal elements such as gender or age and social
characteristics like ethnic belonging or economic well-being all belong to
this category of qualities that cannot be either modified or hidden, but
which some electors may appreciate and some may not (see Enelow and
Hinich 1982, 1984).14 Interestingly, ascriptive issues share with positional
policy issues the same kind of electors’ assessments, because they are both
commonly attributed parties’ characteristics on which electors may have

various preferences. The sociodemographic status of candidates can, in
fact, be important information cues for electoral decisions (Nyhuis 2016;
Cutler 2002; Sanbonmatsu 2002).15 However, even though the sociode-
mographic status is independent of candidates’ policy profiles, it should
not be considered part of candidates’ comprehensive valence advantages
as it does not have a definitive effect on vote choices, that is candidate
gender or race does not suggest an inherent quality differential, but rather
a quality that is dependent on the spectator. A specific sociodemographic
marker may be considered advantageous by one voter while being a deter-
rent for another. Compare this with candidate competence (a non-policy
valence issue). Although perceptions of competence might not be related
to actual candidate competence, the underlying dimension does suggest
an unambiguous quality differential, not an arbitrary grouping variable.
Yet policy and ascriptive issues are not the same things: the latter corre-
spond to parties’ positions in the policy space, while the former are related
to endowments to which no choice corresponds.
This last aspect therefore indicates a second dimension according to
which the possible moves available during a political confrontation can
be differentiated. This dimension refers to the possibility for parties (and
candidates) to affect the content (that can be related to position, reputa-
tion, or endowment) of the ‘argument’ of this confrontation, at least in
the short term of a campaign.
For example, parties can effectively change their position on a set
of policy dimensions (and indeed the relative large variability in their
left-right positions over time confirms this conclusion; see Budge et al.
2001). As just discussed, ascriptive issues lack this feature. Similarly, also
policy-based valence issues are relatively stable in the short term. For
instance, (almost) every voter dislikes inflation (Budge et al. 2001: 81).
Nevertheless, electors see pro-market parties as better able than socialist
parties to carry through their common aversion to inflation, because par-
ties’ long-standing reputations in this respect cannot be changed in the
short run. As long as this is true, inflation is, in my terms, a policy valence
issue in a particular electoral competition that cannot be credibly cham-
pioned by parties at will. If a party traditionally ‘owns’ a policy valence
issue, it will be hard for others to intrude into its territory, and if they do,
that is if a competitor mimics that policy position, voters are likely to give
the ‘benefit of the doubt’ to the traditional ‘owner’ (Feld and Grofman
1991; Adams 1998). This implies that parties will not politically campaign
by repositioning themselves, but rather by selectively emphasizing issues:

rather than taking a position on all possible policy issues, they focus on
those shared policy goals where they are perceived as particularly credible
(Budge and Farlie 1983; Petrocik 1996; Robertson 1976), that is, where
they enjoy a favourable position in terms of reputation (i.e. where voters
believe that one party is more competent in handling an issue than the
other parties).16 They will often do so by attempting to convert positional
into policy valence issues by hiding implied policy trade-offs (see De Sio
and Weber 2014). For example, leftist parties can emphasize welfare state
expansion (but not tax increases); similarly, conservative parties can stress
lower taxes (but not welfare cuts). Selective emphasis on only one side of
a policy trade-off allows parties to present issues in policy valence terms
(shared goals for the whole community) that are inherently positional (i.e.
with defined policy alternatives over which voters present a given distri-
bution of preferences). But in all of these cases, parties will compete by
emphasizing issues on which their reputations cannot be changed (once
again, in the short-time period).
On the other side, there are conducts welcomed by all electors that par-
ties can seize and support at once, as the opportunity arises; and these are,
in my terms, mainly related to non-policy valence issues. Highlighting the
topic of corruption, as already discussed earlier, is one of the main short-
run party strategies about commonly shared values that can be highlighted
for its importance in real electoral contests. More generally, the deliberate
exploitation of a non-policy valence issue includes all the actions aimed at
impressing the entire electorate by playing on commonly shared values.
The foregoing discussion suggests a typology of campaigning issues that
depends on two variables: (1) parties’ choice and (2) electors’ preference
variability. Let us suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that only two pos-
sible states exist for these two variables, that is presence (YES) or absence
(NO) of parties’ choice (in affecting a policy position or a valence endow-
ment) and existence (YES) or non-existence (NO) of electors’ preference
variability. Distinguishing campaigning issues in relation to actors’ prefer-
ence and choice brings about a systematic arrangement of those different
kinds that to date have been only occasionally and separately considered
by the theorists. This leads to the scheme in Table 1.1, which shows four
different kinds of competitive issues obtained by crossing the two dichoto-
mous variables.
The above scheme is basically an analytical construct. A specific party
or candidate characteristic can belong to one type or the other. Moreover,
inclusion of an issue in one category or another may depend on the stand-

point from which it is viewed. A party promoting the independence of a
region which is currently part of a national country can be seen as advocat-
ing a policy valence issue from the regional point of view (when the cause is
shared by all the local population), but as raising an ascriptive issue if consid-
ered in the perspective of the country as a whole. Similarly, competence is a
non-policy valence issue if it is interpreted in a general way (as a party’s com-
petence to govern: see Chap. 3 in this regard), but it is a policy valence issue
if competence is related to a specific topic, such as when it pertains to the
ability of parties to deliver on issues such as the capacity to reduce crime or
to manage the economy. More in general, as rightly underlined by Stokes:
‘the question whether a given problem poses a position- or valence issue is a
matter to be settled empirically and not on a priori logical grounds’ (1963:
373). In other words, an issue that is divisive in one context (a positional
issue) may be uncontroversial in another (a valence issue) and vice versa,
according to how the particular issue becomes (or not) contentious, as a
function (also) of time, political competition, and framing (see Green and
Jennings 2017). Finally, in the medium-long term, all competitive issues are
substantially modifiable (exactly as happens when a party changes its name
or symbol). This notwithstanding, the preceding scheme remains a suitable
basis for clarifying the different roles played by distinct campaigning issues
during a political confrontation.
A further analytically interesting difference with respect to competi-
tive issues concerns their ‘direction’. For example, according to Benoit’s
well-known Functional Theory (Benoit 1999, 2007), political campaign
discourse possesses one encompassing goal, that is winning the election by
convincing enough citizens to cast their votes for one candidate. In order
to convince voters during a campaign, candidates and parties can choose
to focus on their own accomplishments (i.e. delivering a positive message)
or their opponents’ failures (i.e. delivering a negative message)17, or some
combination thereof; that is, they can either acclaim (engage in self-praise
of their positive accomplishments or qualities) or attack (criticizing other
candidates’ failures or negative qualities).18
These assertions can, moreover, occur on two topics, namely policy
and character (Benoit 2007). A similar distinction is drawn by Brooks and
Geer (2007), who differentiate between ‘trait-based’ attacks that focus
on personal characteristics (‘My opponent has not been a leader of our
community. This lack of leadership will prevent him from being an effec-
tive representative’) and issue-based attacks that focus instead on policy
NOTES 21
matters (‘Education in our communities is suffering today because my

opponent has failed to support our local teachers and our schools’).
The ‘direction’ of the campaign can be easily extended to include also
non-policy valence issues such as corruption. In this sense, praising one’s
own stance with respect to honesty in public affairs and personal willing-
ness to fight corruption can be considered the positive side of such politi-
cal confrontation (what is at stake is improving the party’s own valence
endowment) while discrediting the opponent’s value reputation with
respect to corruption as its negative side (what is at stake is worsening the
opponent’s valence endowment).
By treating political corruption as a non-policy valence issue, and by
assuming the possibility of parties’ intentional adoption of valence issues
as depicted in Table 1.1, in the next chapters, I will investigate whether
parties’ relative ideological positions may regularly induce them to empha-
size or overlook the role of non-policy valence issues (such as corruption)
in electoral contests by first focusing on a bipartisan system (Chap. 2). I
will then extend the model based on the relation between spatial variables
and valence campaigning by considering the more commonly observed
multiparty system (Chap. 3), while moving empirically also beyond the
non-policy valence issues of corruption alone. Finally, I will show, resum-
ing what was noted above, the importance of differentiating the directions
of valence campaigning on corruption issues (i.e. purely negative, as occurs
when a party blames other parties for being corrupt, or positive, such
as praising oneself for being honest). My research question is therefore
similar to the one adopted by the literature on the Comparative Agendas
Project (John et al. 2013), given that I try to understand the reasons why
parties may have an incentive to highlight specific issues during their polit-
ical confrontation. Conversely, and contrary to the Comparative Agendas
Project, I focus explicitly on non-policy valence rather than on policy (or
policy valence) issues, paying specific attention to political corruption.
Notes
1. The research string used within the Jstor.org database has been the following
one: (corruption) AND la:(eng OR en) AND disc:(politicalscience-discipline).
2. The number of articles in the Google Scholar database referring to corrup-
tion in their title was found by using the following search string: allintitle:
corruption. The number of articles on politics was obtained by using the
following search string: allintitle: politic OR politics OR political OR policy.
3. See Kostadinova (2009) for a less straightforward relationship between

corruption and turnout.
4. Checks in fact facilitate monitoring, but they do not automatically make it
effective. As noted in Heller et al. (2016), whether actors who control
checks are willing to reveal malfeasance depends on how their fortunes are
linked to the ability to cooperate with other veto players in passing legisla-
tion. This implies that in democratic regimes, corruption tends to be high-
est when checks are many and partisan differences are few. This is because
veto players who observe bad behaviour by co-partisans may want to keep
it hidden, while the incentive to turn a blind eye decreases for malefactors
in rival parties.
5. See Volkens et al. (2016), as well as the following Internet site: https://
manifesto-project.wzb.eu/
6. https://visuals.manifesto-project.wzb.eu/mpdb-shiny/cmp_dashboard_
corpus/
7. The underlying reason why perception measures (such as the CPI) are
employed as a substitute for a ‘hard measure’ such as conviction rates is
that it is very difficult to observe corruption directly because of the illegal
and clandestine nature of the activity. At least for European countries,
however, these perceptions appear to be quite consistent with actual levels
of reported corruption (Charron 2016), although some authors remain
skeptical about this (see Ko and Samajdar 2010). Moreover, expert assess-
ment (on which the CPI is largely based) appears to closely match citizens’
perceptions of corruption. It should be noted, however, that the distance
between citizen and expert corruption perceptions decreases as a function
of country-level development (see Razafindrakoto and Roubaud 2010).
8. See http://www.icgg.org/; http://www.transparency.org/
9. The CPI defines public corruption as ‘the misuse of public power for pri-
vate benefits’. It does not include measures of corruption in private orga-
nizations, such as insider trading.
10. The CPI’s tendency not to vary substantially over time at the country level
has already been noted by the literature (see, e.g. Escresa and Picci 2016).
This relative ‘time invariance’ may be due to measurement limits or simply
to the fact that actual corruption does not change that much in a country
over a relatively long time period.
11. Formally, the intra-class correlation ρ for the CPI variable is expressed as
follows: ρ = Var(ζj)/ Var(ζj + εij), where Var(εij) is the variance component
of the CPI at each single electoral year within a country and Var(ζj) is the
variance component of the CPI at the country level, similarly for
CORRUPTION.
12. Similarly, it can be said that policy-based valence issues relate to shared
(non-positional policy) ends, such that the all citizens agree on those ends
REFERENCES 23
(e.g. economic prosperity). On the contrary, positional policy issues relate

to disagreement over the means to those ends (e.g. which fiscal policies to
pursue: see Fiorina 1981).
13. This will be discussed more analytically in the next chapter.
14. Ascriptive issues are therefore related with identity-based voting, such as a
choice based on ethnicity, class, gender, or when a voter takes a decision
affected by her pre-existing party attachment.
15. Another aspect concerns candidate appearance, because voters may apply
visual cues to make judgments on a candidate’s competence (Mattes et al.
2010; Todorov et al. 2005).
16. In the famous example reported by Stokes (1963), Eisenhower in 1952
decided to campaign on “Korea, Communism, and Corruption” while care-
fully avoiding a more classic spatial strategy on the left-right dimension.
17. In the literature, the latter kind of strategy is generally labelled ‘negative
campaigning’ (see Chaps. 2 and 4).
18. A third possibility refers to the strategy to defend (refute attacks).
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CHAPTER 2
The Ideological Incentive for Campaigning

on Corruption Issues: The Two-Party Case
This chapter presents the theoretical model employed to identify the rela-
tionship between ideological positions and the incentives of a party to
campaign on political corruption. The starting point is the recognition
that valence campaigning, as happens for all the campaigning moves that
a party can decide to adopt (see Table 1.1), is costly because financial
and human resources have to be spent on it to point out the party’s own
merits or to show the opponent’s failures on shared values. Then, as elec-
tions approach and a comprehensive message must to be brought to the
electors’ attention, the party’s limited resources for valence campaigning
have to be carefully allocated in order to draw the most fruitful results
from them. This decision may depend on a wide range of factors tied to
the characteristics of the current election. However, it can be approached
in a systematic way if general conditions can be envisaged that regularly
induce parties to emphasize or overlook valence campaigning in relation
to whether it is more or less promising in terms of votes.
My research question is therefore as follows: are there spatial condi-
tions that may induce parties to campaign on valence issues with more or
less intensity? And more precisely, to anticipate the key component of the
proposed model, are there relative party positions in the ideological space
that may increase or reduce their incentives to emphasize campaigning on
corruption?
In this regard, I focus on the consequences that a change in the rela-
tive ideological locations of parties can have on a party’s decision to adopt
a valence campaign based on political corruption in a two-party system.
© The Author(s) 2018 29

L. Curini, Corruption, Ideology, and Populism,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-56735-8_2
30 2 THE IDEOLOGICAL INCENTIVE FOR CAMPAIGNING ON CORRUPTION...
I will then consider the empirical implications of the theoretical model.

In this regard, I will first focus the analysis on the United States, which
represents, to a large extent, a ‘pure’ two-party system. I will then shift
my attention to Italy and Japan during their respective long periods of no-
cabinet alternation (i.e. until the early 1990s). Although these two latter
democracies cannot be considered two-party systems, they still can be ana-
lysed, with some caveats highlighted below, via the theoretical framework
discussed in the present chapter. Moreover, focusing on Italy and Japan
enables better investigation to be made of the negative side of valence
campaigning on corruption carried forward by a ‘perennial’ opposition
party and on its consequences.
2.1 A Spatial Model with Two Parties

In the last three decades or so, in spite of Stokes’ opinion on the lim-
ited scope of spatial theory (Stokes 1963), his distinction between posi-
tion and valence issues has been brought back into the ‘spatial machinery’
in the already-cited study by Enelow and Hinich (1982), where voters’
assessment of the non-policy characteristics of candidates or parties enters
into the voters’ utility functions by an additive term independent of their
ideological preferences and specific to parties and candidates. Then the
interest in the role of valence issues has rapidly grown in the political
science literature (see Chap. 1, Sect. 1.3). Some authors have privileged
empirical research (Clarke et al. 2004, 2009; Abney et al. 2013; Green
and Jennings 2012), while others have also undertaken theoretical mod-
elling with spatial election models. Assuming that parties or candidates
vary in their ‘endowments’ of valence issues, it is possible to explore the
strategic implications of such differences (Ansolabehere and Snyder 2000;
Groseclose 2001; Schofield 2003; Harrington and Hess 1996; Aragones
and Palfrey 2002; Adams et al. 2005; Schofield and Sened 2006; Adams
and Merrill 2009, 2013; di Lonardo 2016; Carter and Patty 2015). In all
these studies, the aim is to determine the impact of valence issues on par-
ties’ strategic choices (in game theoretical terms, their Nash equilibrium
in policy locations).
For example, Groseclose (2001) analyses an environment where one
candidate has a valence advantage and the position of the median voter is
uncertain. He shows that the greater the valence advantage of one can-
didate, the more the candidates diverge in equilibrium, even though the
advantaged candidate always chooses a platform more moderate than that
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1 Political Corruption and Valence Issues 1

2 The Ideological Incentive for Campaigning on

3 The Ideological Incentive to Campaign on

4 The Direction of Valence Campaigning in

Fig. 1.1 Number of books and articles referring to corruption in

Fig. 2.8 Party L’s incentive to compete on valence depends on the

Fig. 5.2 The ideological-valence loop 169

Table 1.1 A typology of campaign issues 17

Table 4.3 List of parties and Twitter accounts, number of tweets

Then, from a theoretical point of view, I shall use a straightforward spatial

Bell, D. (1960). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in

Sides, J. (2007). The Consequences of Campaign Agendas. American

Political Corruption and Valence Issues

© The Author(s) 2018 1

c­ ampaigning moves available to political actors (candidates and/or par-

1.1 The Growing Interest in Corruption

Number of articles referring to corruption

1950–60 1961–70 1971–80 1981–90 1991–00 2001–10 2011–16

Jstor: references to corruption in the text

the wealthy—over others (Engler 2016; Anderson and Tverdova 2003),

1.2 Politicizing Corruption

40s 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s 00s 10s

Data source: CMP (version 2016a)

Fig. 1.2 Average emphasis on CORRUPTION in parties’ manifestoes over

There follow some examples of sentences dealing explicitly with cor-

Data source: CMP (version 2016a)

country of CORRUPTION. In Fig. 1.3, for example, several cases present

incentive to highlight corruption issues in their public confrontation is

1.3 What Is Meant by ‘Valence Issues’?

Unimodal Policy Issue Bimodal Policy Issue

economic growth, preferring prosperity to stagnation. Hence they will

And it may well happen that a majority occasionally chooses a corrupt

on a bibliometric search, the number of works discussing valence issues

Table 1.1 A typology of campaign issues

Parties’ choice YES Policy issues Non-policy-based valence issues

commonly attributed parties’ characteristics on which electors may have

by repositioning themselves, but rather by selectively emphasizing issues:

inclusion of an issue in one category or another may depend on the stand-

matters (‘Education in our communities is suffering today because my

3. See Kostadinova (2009) for a less straightforward relationship between

(e.g. economic prosperity). On the contrary, positional policy issues relate

Bågenholm, A. (2013). Throwing the Rascals Out? The Electoral Effects of

Kostadinova, T. (2009). Abstain or Rebel: Corruption Perceptions and Voting in

Petrocik, J. R. (1996). Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980

The Ideological Incentive for Campaigning

© The Author(s) 2018 29

I will then consider the empirical implications of the theoretical model.

2.1 A Spatial Model with Two Parties

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1 Political Corruption and Valence Issues 1

2 The Ideological Incentive for Campaigning on

3 The Ideological Incentive to Campaign on

4 The Direction of Valence Campaigning in

Fig. 5.2 The ideological-valence loop 169

Table 1.1 A typology of campaign issues 17

c ampaigning moves available to political actors (candidates and/or par-