Corruption, Partisanship, and Voting: Lessons from a Survey Experiment during the Brazilian Presidential Election

Abstract

Survey experiment studies show that corruption can reduce a voter’s willingness to vote for acandidate but that positive partisanship for that candidate can lessen the detrimental impact ofcorruption on vote likelihood. How corruption affects voting among nonpartisans and negativepartisans, though, remains understudied. Using a preregistered survey experiment fielded inBrazil between the first and second rounds of the 2022 presidential elections, we examinehow corruption information affects vote intention for president across different partisan types.However, we find no different effects of corruption on vote choice across the three partisantypes. Through exploratory analyses of our survey data, we show that our experiment mostlikely produced null findings because Brazil’s 2022 election was highly polarized environmentwhere corruption perceptions and partisanship were strongly intertwined, and our choice to usereal corruption information about actual candidates instead of hypothetical candidates drasticallyweakened our treatment in such an environment.