A Little Too Little, A Little Too Late: The Political Impact of Russia’s Anti-Corruption Enforcement

Abstract

Similarly to “wars” on drugs and terrorism, the fight against corruption has recently emerged as an attractive political tool. From Argentina and India to the United States and the Philippines, anti-corruption rhetoric has been successfully utilized by political outsiders to challenge establishment candidates. It remains less clear, however, whether anti-corruption enforcement allows incumbent politicians to hold on to power. In this article, we use a comparative subnational design to analyze the impact of corruption prosecutions on electoral support for the president of Russia. By combining original survey data on popular political attitudes and behaviors as well as citizens’ own participation in petty corruption with official statistics on corruption prosecutions, on the one hand, and data on media coverage of regional corruption scandals, on the other, we reveal a small negative effect of anti-corruptionism on voting for Putin. Our data allow us to adjudicate among several theoretical mechanisms that may lead to this effect. We find that, although ordinary Russians dislike corruption and expect the federal government to fight it, Putin’s anti-corruption enforcement has failed to convince the population that he is the right man for the job. Some Russians, we argue, take the Kremlin’s prosecutions as an indicator of the regime’s failure to prevent corruption among its agents, while others resent the administration for trying to score political points through hyped-up and punitive anti-corruptionism.

Research leaves little doubt regarding the harms of corruption. Corruption sustains and increases inequality, deepens poverty, undermines development, fuels civil unrest, and allows narrow interests to capture political power (Akimoto 2021; Ambraseys and Bilham 2011; Justesen and Bjørnskov 2014; Shelley 2014; Yadav and Mukherjee 2016). Reflecting the growing realization of its negative consequences, the fight against corruption has become a top priority for the international community, generating massive amounts of resources—material as well as symbolic—to be claimed by the “integrity warriors” (or corruption fighters) on global, national, and subnational levels (De Sousa et al. 2012; Gemperle 2018; Sampson 2010). Simultaneously, corruption has revealed strong mobilization potential at the grassroots level. Between 2000 and 2015, disgruntlement with state and business corruption fueled citizen protests around the world, from the Arab Spring in the Middle East to the Occupy Movement in North America and Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe, bringing down political leaders from Korea to Brazil, from Guatemala to Iceland, and from Ukraine to Pakistan (Sutton 2017).

Similarly to recent “wars” on drugs and terrorism, the fight against corruption has, in this context, emerged as an attractive political tool for actors vying for power (De Sousa et al. 2012; Pavlik 2017). Anti-corruption rhetoric has been successfully utilized by numerous political outsiders seeking to challenge establishment candidates or unseat the incumbents. In countries as diverse as Argentina, India, United States, the Philippines, and Nigeria, in the span of just one decade, a slew of politicians rose to national power on promises to “drain the swamp” of their respective governments.

It remains unclear, however, whether anti-corruption offers an effective tool for preserving power in the hands of those who are already in power. In this article, we analyze the impact of corruption prosecutions on a particular type of support, voting support. Theoretically, there are several possibilities. Although corruption itself has been, time and again, shown to reduce citizen political support (Anderson and Tverdova 2003; Chen 2017; Morris and Klesner 2010; Reisinger and Moraski 2017), governments’ efforts to fight corruption may either impress or disappoint their constituents, affecting the popular evaluation of the regime performance and their electoral choices accordingly. Moreover, by putting a spotlight on corruption within the government, even well-executed and successful reforms may chip away at regime legitimacy, decreasing citizens’ electoral support for the regime. Despite these possibilities, however, a number of autocrats have, in recent years, effectively co-opted anti-corruptionism to silence the opposition and intimidate their citizens into supporting them at the ballot box (Sutton 2017; Kukutschka 2018). Yet another possibility, rarely assessed in the literature, is that citizens simply do not take anti-corruption enforcement into consideration when they decide how to vote, either because they are uninformed or because they are not convinced by the seriousness of anti-corruption efforts. It is also, of course, possible (and even likely) that several of these processes unfold at the same time.

Disentangling these potentially intertwined and countervailing effects of anti-corruptionism on voting behavior presents a formidable empirical challenge, especially in non-transparent political systems that restrict public access to reliable data. As a result, most of what is known about the impact of anti-corruptionism on regime support comes from advanced democracies, while studies of autocracies are few and far between (Zhang 2015; Wang and Dickson 2022). In this article, we seek not only to assess the impact of anti-corruption enforcement on electoral support for autocratic leadership but also to shed light on the mechanisms that underlie this impact. To that end, we investigate the relationship between corruption prosecutions and ordinary Russians’ electoral behavior.

Russia is a telling yet understudied case. President Putin’s recent anti-corruption drive is often seen as a part of his strategy to hold on to power in the face of Russians’ growing disgruntlement with corruption, fueled by the work of the country’s most effective oppositional activist in the post-Soviet era, Alexei Navalny (Aburamoto 2019). In considering whether Putin’s reactive anti-corruptionism has paid off, we use a comparative subnational research design and combine several sources of data. To adjudicate among several possible mechanisms, we first separate high-profile corruption cases that receive a lot of media attention and implicate elite perpetrators from low-profile cases of bribery in the public sector, which impact ordinary citizens directly but have little public visibility. Second, we separately assess how corruption prosecutions influence citizen evaluations of regime performance and their perceptions of regime fairness.

Our findings are surprising. In contrast to China, where Xi Jinping’s almost contemporaneous anti-corruptionism has, reportedly, yielded substantial gains in regime popularity (Zhang 2015; Zhao 2016), the Kremlin’s attempts to co-opt corruption prosecutions have failed to generate much reaction among ordinary citizens. To the extent that anti-corruption enforcement did shift public electoral support for the regime, it did so negatively, with Russians living in areas with more corruption-related arrests being less rather than more likely to vote for Putin in 2018. Our assessment of mechanisms that underlie this effect reveals that ordinary Russians take corruption prosecutions as a sign of regime ineffectiveness and, while they do want corruption to be addressed, they are not convinced that Kremlin’s efforts represent either an effective or an earnest attempt to do so. In light of the Kremlin’s recent shift from its anti-corruption efforts, we conclude by raising concerns about the possibility of a notable increase in Russian state’s repressions against its citizens in its quest for increased electoral support.

1. How Can Corruption Prosecutions Affect Electoral Behavior in Autocracies?

Some readers may wonder whether understanding citizens’ electoral behavior is at all important in non-democratic societies like Russia. In other words, if elections are manipulated by those in power, why try to understand them at all? In recent years, political scientists have argued that many contemporary autocrats are not content with blatantly fabricating election results but, instead, allow some degree of choice at the ballot box to assess what social issues matter to their publics, who other potentially serious contenders for power are, and who has the organizational skills needed to win a campaign or to help the preferred candidate win (Gandhi and Lust-Okar 2009; Levitsky and Way 2010; Schedler 2013). Without allowing the possibility of the actual transfer of power, in Russia and other competitive autocracies, elections serve as “plebiscites on the regime’s popularity”, ultimately intended to legitimize the status quo (Gorokhovskaia 2017; Hanson 2011; Mares and Young 2016). Moreover, Claypool and colleagues (Claypool et al. 2018) argue that while authoritarian leaders closely watch the electoral choices of their constituents, to date, social scientists have rarely looked at them to understand the stability of present-day autocracies. This is, indeed, the case with popular electoral reactions to anti-corruption enforcement. The few studies that do consider the political impact of anti-corruptionism in autocracies focus on attitudinal measures of regime support which, in non-democracies, do not fully align with actual political behavior (i.e., citizens may simultaneously resent and be intimidated into voting for an incumbent).

To address this gap in the literature, we begin by theorizing the different ways that corruption prosecutions may affect citizens’ electoral support for non-democratic politicians. Not only is it possible for anti-corruption enforcement to have positive, negative, or neutral effects on voting for incumbents, but for each of these possibilities, several analytically distinct mechanisms underlying the effect are theoretically plausible. To spell out these mechanisms, we draw on Pippa Norris’s articulation of Easton’s (1965) classic theory of political legitimacy (2011, 26–28). According to Norris, “support for regime principles” has five distinct dimensions: (1) feelings of national pride and identity; (2) support for general regime principles; (3) assessments of the regime’s performance; (4) confidence in state institutions; and (5) trust in officeholders. We theorize that evidence of corruption prosecutions may have an impact on these distinct dimensions of regime support.

First, corruption prosecutions may increase popular support toward incumbents. One way that this may occur is through the mechanism that we call Approval (mechanism 1 in

Table 1. Mechanisms of the impact of corruption convictions on electoral support for incumbents.

	Mechanism	Pathway	Impact on Electoral Support
1.	Approval	Improved evaluations of regime performance	Positive
2.	Legitimation	Improved evaluations of regime fairness	Positive
3.	Fear	Improved apprehension of prosecution by the state	Positive
4.	Disillusionment	Worsened evaluations of regime fairness	Negative
5.	Disappointment	Worsened evaluations of regime performance	Negative
6.	Disgruntlement	Disgruntlement with goals of prosecutions	Negative
7.	Resentment	Distaste for the means chosen to fight corruption	Negative
8.	Ignorance	No knowledge about prosecutions	Null
9.	Skepticism	A lack of belief in the earnestness/effectiveness of anti-corruption	Null
10.	Irrelevance	No consideration of anti-corruption for regime evaluation	Null

) whereby citizens interpret evidence of enforcement-centered anti-corruption efforts, often touted in state-controlled media as a resounding success (Zhang 2015), to indicate that political elites are effective at carrying out their job. This may lead to improved evaluations of regime performance, which is one of the foundational blocks of regime support (Norris 2011).

Moreover, by investigating and prosecuting corruption perpetrators, political elites may effectively frame themselves as bona fide integrity warriors, signaling their rejection of corruption and distancing themselves from those who abuse power. As a result, corruption prosecutions may decrease perceptions of corruption among political leaders, raise confidence in regime legitimacy, and increase trust in government office holders (Norris’s dimensions 4 and 5), ultimately growing the electoral support for the regime in a mechanism that we call Legitimation (mechanism 2 in Table 1). Zhang (2015) and Zhao (2016), for instance, find that popular assessments of China ruling regime’s integrity improved significantly following a highly publicized crackdown on corrupt officials, especially among the politically aware Chinese citizens who had been skeptical about the regime. Importantly, Approval and Legitimation mechanisms are likely to work together as perceptions of effectiveness, even if analytically distinct, and are empirically linked to how effective the government is perceived to be. Arguably, both were at play in raising popular support for Xi Jinping in the wake of his punitive anti-corruption campaign (Hualing 2015).

Yet another mechanism that may underlie the positive impact of corruption prosecutions on electoral regime support, unique to non-democracies, is fear of being targeted by the regime (mechanism 3, Fear, in Table 1). Researchers note that anti-corruption in non-democracies is often “repressive and discriminatory” (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015, p. 62). In addition to selectively punishing some abuses while leaving others unchecked (Kukutschka 2018), such anti-corruption often undermines citizens’ rights to privacy, free expression, association, and fair trial (Krajewska and Makowski 2017). Classic examples come from Singapore, Qatar, and Rwanda, but scholars also bring up examples from China, Botswana, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Vietnam, and Thailand (Bozzini 2013; Krastev and Inozemtsev 2013; Sutton 2017; Zaloznaya 2017). When anti-corruption is enforcement-centered, punitive, and selective, it may generate widespread fear of dissent and increase the pressure that citizens feel to express attitudinal and behavioral support for the ruling regime, in part, ironically, so as not to fall victim to politically motivated “anti-corruption” purges (mechanism 5, Fear, in Table 1).

The second distinct possibility is that anti-corruption initiatives erode rather than enhance popular support for incumbent politicians. For instance, it is possible that, by shining spotlight on abuses of power on the government, they heighten citizens’ perceptions of corruption among their leaders and increase popular feelings of the state as unfair (mechanism 4, Disillusionment, in Table 1). Besides Disillusionment in the fairness of the regime, the increased visibility of corruption may also worsen evaluations of the regime’s performance (mechanism 5, Disappointment, in Table 1). Specifically, the visibility of corruption in the government may lead citizens to conclude that state is not effective in controlling its agents and that incumbent leadership performs poorly in preventing abuse. Many studies offer supportive evidence for the Disillusionment and Disappointment mechanisms. For instance, Bowler and Karp (2004) find that knowledge of corruption scandals involving legislators in the US and the UK erodes citizens’ regard of political institutions and the political process more broadly; Beesley and Hawkins (2022) find deleterious effects of information about corruption on popular political trust in Peru; Solé-Ollé and Sorribas-Navarro (2018) show that corruption scandals in Spain have a depressive impact on trust in local politicians; and Wang and Dickson (2022) show that high-profile corruption investigations have a small but negative impact on ordinary Chinese citizens’ support for their national leadership. In light of this consensus, Holmes (2003) and Andersson and Heywood (2012), in fact, highlight the dangers that intensive anti-corruption purges hold in democratizing societies. By diminishing citizen confidence in government’s fairness and effectiveness, they argue, such purges may lead to iterative cycles of anti-corruptionism-fueled elections followed by corruption accusations against incumbents and their own fall from grace.

Yet another possibility is that the negative effect on voting for incumbents reflects popular discontent with anti-corruption purges themselves. There may be two reasons for this. For one, citizens may simply not want corruption to be eradicated. Many studies document beneficial outcomes of public sector bribery for ordinary citizens across post-socialist countries. Arguably, petty bribes, favors, and string-pulling, arguably, allow them to get by in the contexts of institutional dysfunction and economic inefficiency. Some even think that, in a tacit bargain with the state, citizens expect widespread corruption from their leaders in exchange for political support or at least in exchange for no active opposition (Polese 2016; Polese et al. 2018; Urinboyev et al. 2018). If corruption is, indeed, useful for ordinary citizens, they may be disgruntled by the government’s effort to deprive them of the imperfect yet functional coping strategy of dealing with inefficient state institutions (mechanism 6, Disgruntlement, in Table 1).

Alternatively, even if citizens are supportive of the official goals of anti-corruptionism, they may dislike the ways that incumbents go about accomplishing them. For instance, citizens may see through the thinly veiled campaign of politicized crackdowns and resent political elites for subverting the direly needed reforms in pursuit of political power. Excessive, visible, and selective punitiveness at the expense of constructive reforms—which often happens in non-democratic or not fully democratic contexts (Lawson 2009; Hualing 2015; Zaloznaya et al. 2018b)—may only exacerbate their negative feelings toward incumbents (mechanism 7, Resentment, in Table 1).

There exists, of course, a third alternative that is rarely discussed explicitly in the literature on anti-corruptionism: the possibility that corruption prosecutions have a null effect on regime support. In this case, the anti-corruption efforts of the government fail to generate either positive or negative impact on citizens’ electoral support. For one, information about state’s anti-corruption efforts may simply not reach the constituents, leaving them unaware that their government is actively fighting corruption (mechanism 8, Ignorance, in Table 1). Studies confirm, in fact, that changes in popular regime support depend heavily on the public being informed about the regime’s successes, failures, or malfeasance (see Dunning et al. 2019 for an overview). Alternatively, citizens may be aware of the state’s anti-corruption efforts but remain unconvinced that the regime is truly committed to eradicating corruption. This may be because the public is desensitized to the state’s claims or because citizens think that different (i.e., more substantial) changes are needed to deal with the problem of corruption. In this case, they may dismiss anti-corruption as half-hearted or hypocritical (mechanism 9, Skepticism, in Table 1).

Lastly, corruption prosecutions may have no effect on popular political behaviors because, in many autocracies, abuses of power tend to be deeply institutionalized within the political order. Many such countries have a long history of widespread corruption that, over time, has become normalized and expected by the citizens (Michailova and Worm 2003; Varese 2000). Given this systemic nature of corruption, citizens may be either indifferent to new revelations of corruption or simply not expect any one campaign to make a notable dent in its prevalence. Even if they would prefer to live under transparent governance, they may not factor anti-corruptionism into their evaluations of regime performance (mechanism 10, Irrelevance, in Table 1). In fact, some political scientists argue that the foundations of popular support for political regimes differ in democracies and autocracies (see Junisbai and Junisbai (2019, p. 242) for an overview). Under democracy, citizens expect equitable consideration of all constituents’ interests, elected officials’ accountability, and the competence of public servants in their roles (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Urbinati and Warren 2008). Corruption in all forms clearly violates these principles and earnest efforts to fight it should improve popular political attitudes (Hetherington 1998; Miller 1974). Citizens of non-democracies, by contrast, typically look to their political leaders for national security, economic stability, and heightened geopolitical status and may, therefore, not consider corruption eradication efforts when they evaluate the incumbents (Mauk 2020).

2. Russia’s Corruption Problem and Anti-Corruption Efforts

The only way to assess these different theoretical possibilities is by bringing together multiple different types of data on both corruption and anti-corruption. Focusing on Russia offers a unique opportunity to delve deeper into the pathways of anti-corruption’s impact on regime support because Russia simultaneously has substantial regional variation in corruption patterns (Dininio and Orttung 2005; Zaloznaya et al. 2018a) and regional differences in anti-corruption enforcement (Schulze et al. 2016), close oversight of the regions by the central government, and a sufficient, standardized record-keeping tradition (Herrera 2010). Similarly to other post-Soviet states, Russia has recently undergone the politicization of its long-standing problem with corruption and the rise of an efficacious oppositional movement focused on exposing corruption. At the same time, in contrast to cases like Qatar, Rwanda, and even China, Russia’s leadership has not achieved clear-cut success in using anti-corruption to consolidate its power, and there is no strong consensus about the effects that it has had on Putin’s popularity. Even more interestingly, most if not all of the mechanisms of impact discussed in the previous section are plausible in the Russian context. Below, we discuss the history of Russia’s corruption and anti-corruption and theoretical possibilities of how the latter has affected citizen support for Putin’s leadership.

Corruption in all its forms has been ubiquitous in Russia for decades. During the Soviet era, state capture by the Communist Party allowed for systematic abuse of power and the concentration of wealth in the hands of select high-level officials. During the 1990s, economic liberalization and political turmoil led to further growth of large-scale business and political corruption. Throughout the region, chaotic market reforms in the context of a legal vacuum and institutional dysfunction created ample opportunities for graft and the appropriation of natural and industrial resources by well-positioned individuals and groups, leading to the rise of oligarchs and criminalization of large swaths of the country’s economy (Puglisi 2003; Ledeneva 2006; Fritz 2007). Under Putin’s governance, these mostly independent economic elites of the early post-Soviet era gave way to a tight centralized network of cronies, installed to lead the largest enterprises that commanded most of the country’s wealth. The support of these loyalists has been instrumental for Putin’s political success (Taylor 2018).

Corruption is also routine at the lower levels of the Russian government, with, depending on the poll, up to 45% of ordinary citizens reporting giving bribes to public servants. Small monetary payments, presents, favors, and string-pulling in the public sector date back to the central planning systems of the Communist era. Under socialism, firm output quotas and ineffective, state-controlled resource allocation mechanisms gave rise to in-kind, delayed reciprocity transactions known as blat, which offered ordinary Soviets a flexible alternative to rigid and politicized institutions. In the post-socialist era, public sector corruption has continued to allow citizens to receive better-than-basic services and improve their interactions with agents of the Russian state (Rivkin-Fish 2005; Denisova-Schmidt 2012; Zaloznaya and Gerber 2021).

Thus, while corruption is usually considered antithetical and corrosive to the Weberian state, in Russia, both high- and low-level corruption can be seen as “hierarchy-reinforcing” (Darden 2008) and supportive of the neopatrimonial system of governance (Gel’man 2016; Tsygankov 2014). This may explain why, until recently, Russian political leaders made only limited efforts to address corruption. The first bona fide anti-corruption reforms were undertaken by Putin’s ally Dmitriy Medvedev who served as a “stand-in” President from 2008 to 2012; these, however, were almost exclusively legislative and had few, if any, tangible consequences (Schulze et al. 2016).

The anti-corruption drive, initiated after Putin’s return to presidency in 2012, represents the most intensive campaign against corruption in Russia’s modern history. Analysts agree that Putin’s heightened interest in corruption was a reaction to the first truly viable opposition movement since his ascent to power a decade earlier. Led by the young lawyer Alexei Navalny, who became a household name by exposing high-level abuses of power at the intersection of the state and business on his popular blog, this movement was fueled by the growing anti-corruption sentiment among ordinary Russians. Navalny’s work combined with deteriorating economic conditions to inspire mass anti-government protests that swept over Moscow and other cities following the rigged Parliamentary elections of 2011 (Krastev and Inozemtsev 2013; Aburamoto 2019).

President Putin’s initial response to the growing opposition entailed stricter limitations on freedoms of assembly and direct attacks on Alexey Navalniy’s credibility, including the passage of infamous laws “On Foreign Agents” and “Undesirable Organizations”, which imposed strict regulatory requirements on non-governmental organizations that receive support from foreign donors (Goncharenko and Khadaroo 2020; Mason 2016). Next, Putin turned to punitive actions against individuals, intended to reframe corruption as a problem of bad apples that “integrity warriors” within the regime were ready and able to throw out. Like Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption purges of “tigers” and “flies” (Hualing 2015), the Kremlin’s campaign targeted low-level officials as well as elites. To clean up petty corruption in the country’s public sector, the administration implemented substantial reductions in the discretion of service providers and harsher punishments against those who were caught (Abramov and Sokolov 2017; Ustinova 2018). In contrast to the indiscriminately punitive approach to petty corruption, however, the Russian government was selective in targeting elite deviance. While some high-profile prosecutions were carried out on both the national and regional levels (Aburamoto 2019), the overwhelming majority of officials involved in lucrative and consequential corruption schemes, with Putin’s tacit approval or explicit support, remained untouched (Arutunyan 2016). Yet, political and economic elites with suspected oppositional tendencies were subject to restrictions on their physical mobility, property ownership, and economic transactions. For instance, one infamous initiative allegedly targeting high-level corruption was the “nationalization of the elites” whereby state officials and their families were ordered to repatriate all assets they held abroad. Analysts suggest that this measure was intended to threaten officials prone to oppositional tendencies (Krastev and Inozemtsev 2013; Tsygankov 2014).

Although the political intentions behind Russia’s anti-corruptionism are clear to many analysts, its actual effects remain unknown. Moreover, multiple mechanisms of impact are highly plausible in the Russian context. First, it is entirely possible that corruption prosecutions generated fear among citizens, prompting them to vote for the incumbents (mechanism #3, Table 1). Many analysts, in fact, document the pressure that ordinary Russians feel to support the president at the ballot box (Ross 2011; Frye et al. 2019), and visible and selective crackdowns with clear political undertones may have contributed to this pressure. While Russians may see corruption prosecutions as an indicator of the state’s (in)effectiveness (mechanism #5) and (un)fairness (mechanism #4), it is also plausible that anti-corruptionism is irrelevant to their assessment of Putin’s regime (mechanism #10). Research suggests that core sources of popular support for Putin include economic performance, traditionalist ideology, social policy, and nationalism (Robertson and Greene 2017; Mamonova 2019; Treisman 2011; Sokhey 2020). Corruption, which has been a part of Russia’s political culture for decades, if not centuries, may therefore be largely irrelevant to ordinary citizens.

It is also possible that Russians do not want their government to fight corruption, because corruption is seen as unfortunate but necessary (mechanism #6). For instance, Round and Williams (2010) report that petty bribes to bureaucrats represent a tactic of coping with household economic marginalization, while Rimskii (2013) adds that, without bribing service providers, “nothing can be accomplished” in today’s Russia. Whether or not this is indeed the case, public opinion surveys show that most Russians offer bribes out of their own volition and receive improved rather than basic services in return (Zaloznaya and Gerber 2021). Lastly, it is plausible that Russians see through the political motivations behind corruption prosecutions. This may lead citizens to not take the prosecutions seriously, leading to a null effect on political attitudes and behaviors (mechanism #9). Alternatively, the feeling of being manipulated by their leaders may generate resentment, driving down the electoral support for the incumbents (mechanism #7). Determining which mechanism(s) are at work in the Russian case will have great value for testing theories of how anti-corruptionism influences political support.

3. Analytic Strategy

We assess the possible mechanisms of anti-corruption’s impact on voting for Putin by examining how political support and corruption prosecutions vary across Russia’s regions or “federal subjects”. A comparative subnational design has several advantages over cross-national studies, on the one hand, and individual-level studies, on the other (Sinha 2012; Snyder 2001). Cross-national comparisons have difficulty accounting for the wide range of differences that could potentially confound an analysis. Countries can differ in many economic, cultural, institutional, and other dimensions, requiring researchers to employ a long list of control variables. In addition, many countries vary within themselves in ways that may be theoretically important, e.g., regional differences or language use. In such cases, the subnational variation gets lost when assigning values to the country as a single case. By making Russia’s regions our cases, we can model those differences rather than aggregate them into one national value. Yet, because the regions are part of the same country and given the increased uniformity of their political power under Vladimir Putin’s “vertical of power”, several of what would otherwise be intervening factors are held constant. In our case, this includes cross-national differences in how law enforcement records corruption, how courts carry out corruption prosecutions, and how media report on corruption scandals. An individual-level analysis runs into the difficulty that Russia is large and diverse, and most citizens are hardly aware of the dynamics of anti-corruption prosecutions nationwide. In addition, individual-level analyses have difficulty accounting for important differences in regional contexts or ecology, which we expect to affect corruption prosecutions and how the public perceives them.

Currently, there are 83 federal subjects in Russia, excluding the four that Russia forcibly annexed in 2014 and 2022. These units vary widely along several social and economic dimensions, such as size, the degree of urbanization, ethnic composition, and economic well-being (Remington 2011; Zubarevich 2012; Slider 2019; Sidorkin and Vorobyev 2018). Geographers stress that such differences create distinct contexts shaping social behavior and outcomes (O’Loughlin 2003). Moreover, despite the establishment of Putin’s “vertical of power”, Russia’s regions continue to exhibit important political differences (Reisinger and Moraski 2017; Sharafutdinova and Steinbuks 2017; Turovsky and Sukhova 2020). This includes differing significantly in the amount of corruption that citizens experience and perceive, as well as the number and intensity of corruption prosecutions (Dininio and Orttung 2005; Kovalev 2017). Students of corruption often emphasize the importance of local cultures—or shared normative environments that develop in organizations, peer groups, neighborhoods, regions, and other meso-level communities—on individual attitudes and behaviors (McDonnell 2020; Treviño et al. 2014; Zaloznaya 2017). These effects cannot be reduced to individual-level calculus and have the “stickiness” of the informal norms that become institutionalized within certain environments as individuals come and go. We therefore expect Russia’s different regions to exhibit distinct environments associated with corruption incidence and prosecutions, which then impact the levels of popular support of the regime.

Using robust regression analyses, we assess the relationship between the corruption ecologies of Russian regions, on the one hand, and regional levels of (1) electoral support for Putin, (2) citizen approval of regime performance, and (3) popular perceptions of corruption in the government, on the other. Since our units of analysis are regions rather than people, we cannot draw direct inferences about the impact of corruption prosecutions on individuals’ political attitudes and behaviors. However, by juxtaposing the magnitude and the direction of the relationship between distinct types of corruption ecologies and various indicators of aggregate regime support, we can rule out several possible mechanisms of impact and present evidence consistent with others.

3.1. Data

We constructed our dataset from several sources. Measures of the aggregate levels of voting for Putin, approval of leadership performance, perceptions of corruption in the government (government fairness), and citizen engagement in public sector corruption were all derived from a representative national survey of Russian adults carried out in July–October 2018. Face-to-face interviews were conducted with 2350 respondents from 64 out of 85 federal districts. A group of US-based investigators worked with a prestigious sociological research firm in Moscow to collect these data. A probability sample was drawn using stratification criteria: the adult population was divided into the federal districts and, within each district, a proportionately balanced random sample was drawn, making sure that more remote provinces and rural areas were included in the sample. A total of 155 primary sampling units (PSUs) were selected from strata proportional to the population size of the strata. Within each PSU, secondary sampling units were chosen randomly. Households were selected using the random route procedure. The survey instrument contained 138 questions under several thematic modules, including modules on corruption behavior, political attitudes and behaviors, and demographics.

We transformed these survey data into regional estimates using multi-level regression with post-stratification (MRP) (Gelman and Little 1997; Lax and Phillips 2009; Pacheco 2011; Park et al. 2004). The MRP began with a multi-level model to estimate our four measures of interest for individuals, given demographic and geographic predictors; individual responses were modeled as nested within regions and also nested within demographic groupings. The 83 regional intercepts were then estimated as a weighted average of the mean of the observations in a region and the mean over all regions. The next step was imputation. Each of the 3320 person types, based on region, gender, age, and education, had an associated probability of holding a given view. Imputation was conducted on each person type even if they were absent from the sample. The final stage was post-stratification. Post-stratification corrected for differences between regional samples and regional populations by weighting the predicted values of each person type in each region by the actual census counts of that person type in a region.

We complemented regional estimates of public opinion with data on anti-corruption prosecutions collected from the official website of Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs. This resource contains official statistics on each region’s total number of monthly violations of Article 290 of the Criminal Code (receiving a bribe) and Article 291 of the Criminal Code (giving a bribe), as registered by the police and as referred to court. We collected these data for the period between 2012 and 2018. Furthermore, for each region, we collected statistics on high-profile bribery cases that were extensively covered in regional mass media between 2012 and 2018. These data were gathered by the Ruxpert project (https://ruxpert.ru/) and are publicly available online. Lastly, we included demographic indicators for Russia’s regions, gathered from the annual Russian Federal State Statistics Service’s publication Rossiiskii Statisticheskii Ezhegodnik: Statisticheskii Sbornik (Rosstat 2018).

3.2. Measures

• Dependent variables1

We measured regional levels of electoral support for Putin with the percentage of the region’s overall population of our survey respondents who reported casting their vote for Putin in the 2018 presidential election (referred to as Voted Putin).

To measure regional levels of popular approval of Putin’s performance (Perceived Government Effectiveness), we used a series of questions asking survey respondents to evaluate to what extent Russia’s political leadership was successful in strengthening the economy, combatting crime, and strengthening Russia’s standing in the world. In answering these questions, respondents used a four-point scale, ranging from very successful to very unsuccessful. Using the MRP process, we produced a measure of the percentage of each region’s respondents who averaged between three (mostly successful) and four (very successful) on these three questions.

Lastly, our measure of regional levels of corruption perceptions among political leadership (Perceived Government Fairness) drew on the survey questions asking respondents to evaluate how corrupt their country’s political leaders and local political leaders were. For each level of government, possible answers included “Almost all are corrupt”, “Many are corrupt”, “Not many are corrupt”, and “Hardly any are corrupt.” Our measure reflected the percentage of all respondents from a specific region who believed that almost all or many of their political leaders, on either level, were corrupt.

• Independent variables

Our primary explanatory variable is anti-corruption ecology, which reflects the regional intensity of corruption prosecutions for bribery. Using Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs statistics, for each region, we added the number of cases of bribery (either taking or receiving a bribe) that were recorded by the police and added the number of cases that were referred to court in each year between 2012 and 2018. We then estimated, for each region, the mean number of cases over these seven years.

We measured the corruption ecology of Russia’s regions using a series of questions from our survey asking whether respondents used corrupt incentives in public services, specifically in education, criminal justice, local government, and healthcare sectors. Those respondents who reported interactions with bureaucrats in these four sectors were asked if, during the preceding two years, they had (1) made payments in addition to any required formal fees; (2) given a present to or carried out a favor for an employee; and (3) asked anybody to reach out to officials or plead with them on the respondents’ behalf. Our measure of corruption ecology, then, was calculated as the percentage of all regional respondents who reported using at least one of these three incentives.

The measure of the visibility of anti-corruptionism (Level of Prominent Corruption Cases) was constructed from the database, maintained by the volunteer project Ruxpert, of all high-profile corruption and graft cases covered by regional media each month. To construct our measure for each region, we first added the number of cases covered in regional media between 2012 and 2017, and to address the problem of outliers (such as Moscow and Crimea, which had disproportionately high numbers of cases), we assigned each region a value between 0 and 4, where “0” represented an absence of any region-level scandals, “1” represented one scandal, “2” represented between 2 and 4 scandals, “3” indicated 5 to 10 scandals, and “4” represented over 10 scandals.

• Controls

We also included in our models two control variables that may have been associated with regional levels of behavioral and attitudinal support towards the regime. These measures were demographic and assessed the ethnic composition of the regions (measured as the percentage of the regions’ population who were ethnic Russians) and their economic well-being (measured as the Gross Regional Product [GRP] per 10,000 residents). Our measure of the ethnic composition of Russia’s regions is also a proxy for the administrative status of the regions, since almost all the regions with a less than 50% Russian population are republics or autonomous regions. Under Russia’s federal system, republics have significantly more autonomy from the federal government (at least nominally) than other federal subjects, such as oblasts, krais, autonomous okrugs, and federal cities.

4. Results and Discussion

The results of our analyses are summarized in

Table 2. Regressions predicting attitudinal and behavioral regime support.

	(1)	(2)	(3)
	Voted	Perceived	Perceived
	Putin	Govt. Effectiveness	Govt. Fairness
Anti-Corruption Ecology	−0.011	−0.026	−0.010
	(0.005)	(0.007)	(0.009)
Level of Prominent Corruption Cases	0.005	0.009	−0.014
	(0.004)	(0.006)	(0.007)
Corruption Ecology	−0.145	−0.406	−0.453
	(0.045)	(0.062)	(0.076)
Ethnic Russians as %	0.000	−0.001	0.000
	(0.000)	(0.000)	(0.000)
GRP per 100 k residents, 2017	−0.002	−0.001	−0.000
	(0.001)	(0.001)	(0.001)
Constant	0.492	0.603	−0.533
	(0.019)	(0.026)	(0.032)
N:	81	82	82
R2:	0.22	0.28	0.18

. We estimated the models using robust regression to account for a small number of regions that were outliers in some of the explanatory variables.2 Indicators of statistical significance are omitted because we analyzed the entire population of Russia’s regions rather than a sample derived from the population.

Coefficients from Robust Regression Standard Errors in Parentheses

Table 2 summarizes the results predicting the effects of the Russian regions’ anti-corruption ecology, level of prominent cases, and corruption ecology, as well as two control variables (wealth and ethnic heterogeneity) on the levels of electoral support for President Putin (Model 1), citizen evaluation of regime performance (Model 2), and citizen assessment of regime fairness (Model 3). Our results reveal a small negative effect of the anti-corruption ecology, or corruption prosecutions, on electoral support for President Putin. Although this is not a large effect, it is noteworthy that regions with the highest number of prosecutions provided just over 5% fewer votes for Putin than regions with the lowest number (see Figure 1). These results are sufficient to reject the theory that corruption prosecutions increase regional levels of electoral support for incumbent autocrats either through the mechanisms of Approval, Legitimation, or Fear (mechanisms 1–3 in Table 1). Our results also allow us to reject another mechanism of political impact of anti-corruptionism, Disillusionment (mechanism 4 in Table 1), because the effect of corruption prosecutions on citizens’ view of government fairness is positive (meaning that evidence of anti-corruption enforcement works to help frame the incumbents as those who fight rather than perpetrate corruption). Given the small size of the positive effect, the latter does not outweigh other pathways toward the negative electoral impact that corruption prosecutions set in motion. One way that this is likely to occur is through a mechanism that we call Disappointment (#5 in Table 1) whereby heightened knowledge about the spread of corruption makes citizens feel that incumbents are incapable or not serious about preventing corruption from happening or about “draining the swamp” of known perpetrators.

Another possibility leading to negative electoral outcomes is Disgruntlement, whereby citizens do not want corruption to be eradicated because it serves them and they therefore dislike the state’s attempts to eliminate it (mechanism 6 in Table 1). To assess this expectation, we included in our analyses a measure of the spread of public sector corruption in the regions (corruption ecology). This measure is strongly and negatively associated with voting for Putin, as well as with our two measures of attitudinal support for the incumbent regime. In other words, regions with widespread corruption are not filled with Putin supporters. This evidence is inconsistent with a theory that citizens like or at least do not mind corruption and, therefore, punish the regime for its attempts to “clean up” the government or do not include corruption prosecutions in their calculus of regime performance.

The second mechanism leading to the negative electoral impact of corruption prosecutions that we cannot reject in light of our results is Resentment (mechanism 7 in Table 1) or popular dissatisfaction with the ways that reforms are actually carried out. Based on this evidence, we conclude that it is likely that Russians are unhappy with corruption but are not convinced that the way that their government chooses to fight it (specifically with its emphasis on selective prosecution) will bring about any real change.

In interpreting our results, however, it is important to ask why the effect of anti-corruption enforcement on Russians’ political behavior is so small. In other words, why do corruption prosecutions fail to create a climate that is substantially more conducive to decreased electoral support for the incumbent regime? To shed light on this question, we propose thinking of our results as pointing somewhere in between the negative and the null effect of corruption prosecutions.

Could it be, for instance, that citizens are not aware of corruption prosecutions and the mechanism that is at play is Ignorance (mechanism 7 in Table 1)? Because our measure of anti-corruption ecology reflects the corruption cases registered by police and referred to courts, a measure that may or may not reflect citizens’ actual knowledge of these cases, it is entirely possible that ordinary Russians, especially in rural areas where citizens are less likely to stay abreast of political developments, are unaware of rigorous anti-corruption enforcement. To assess this possibility, we included in our analyses another measure of anti-corruption ecology, which is based on the number of prosecutions that have received substantial coverage in the regional media. This measure taps into the visibility of punitive anti-corruptionism in each region. Our results show that this measure performs similarly to the overall anti-corruption ecology, generating a small negative effect on electoral support for Putin and popular evaluations of his government’s performance. Interestingly, however, publicized corruption prosecutions have a negative impact on how fair Russians think their government is. While taking care not to over-interpret the results from a model with limited explanatory power, we believe that this negative association is due to the fact that publicized corruption prosecutions usually involve high-level officials and are especially likely to be politicized, perhaps highlighting the state’s selectivity in its anti-corruption efforts. In general, however, the visibility of corruption prosecutions appears to make little difference for their impact on regime support, leading us to reject the expectation that the non-substantial effect of anti-corruption enforcement is due to citizens not knowing about the government’s efforts. Based on our results, we also have enough evidence to reject mechanism 10, Irrelevance. The notable negative effects of corruption ecology on attitudinal and behavioral regime support suggest that corruption, and anti-corruptionism, do matter for citizen evaluations of how their political leaders are performing and whether they deserve to continue leading.

The third mechanism whereby corruption prosecutions may affect electoral behavior that we cannot reject in light of our findings is Skepticism (mechanism 9 in Table 1), according to which Russians are “not buying” that Putin’s efforts are serious or that they have any chance of succeeding in eradicating corruption. This mechanism is also broadly consistent with the other two that appear to be supported by our findings: Disappointment and Resentment.

By considering which theoretical mechanisms are rejected by our analyses and which are not, distinctly and in relation to each other, we obtain an empirical picture of how anti-corruption enforcement has shaped ordinary Russians’ support toward incumbent politicians. We conclude that the small magnitude of the negative association between anti-corruption ecology and regime support, both behavioral and attitudinal, likely reflects ordinary Russians’ general refusal to take corruption prosecutions seriously. While Russians generally dislike corruption, see it as a manifestation of leadership’s poor performance, and consider incumbents responsible for its persistence, they appear skeptical that Putin’s efforts are actually making a dent in solving corruption. In some citizens, evidence of anti-corruption enforcement provokes a negative sentiment, likely because they interpret it as politically subversive and insufficient. Taken together, then, our findings suggest that while President Putin had the correct intuition that addressing corruption was necessary to raise his popular approval, the corruption prosecutions his government has carried out so far have, at best, fallen flat and, at worst, been harmful to regime legitimacy because some citizens interpret it as an act of political manipulation and reflection of the regime’s dysfunction and impotence.

5. Conclusions

In this article, we analyze the impact of anti-corruption enforcement on electoral support for Russia’s president using a comparative subnational design. By combining original survey data on popular political attitudes and behaviors as well as citizens’ own participation in petty corruption with official statistics on corruption-related prosecutions, on the one hand, and data on media coverage of regional corruption scandals, on the other, we show a small negative effect of anti-corruptionism on voting for Putin. Our data allow us to adjudicate among several theoretical mechanisms underlying this effect. We find that, although ordinary Russians dislike corruption and expect the federal government to fight it, Putin’s anti-corruption enforcement so far has failed to convince the population that he is the right man for the job. Some Russians, we theorize, take Kremlin’s prosecutions as an indicator of the regime’s failure to prevent corruption among its agents, while others resent the administration for trying to score political points through widely publicizedand punitive anti-corruption measures.

These findings have distinct implications for students of Russia and the post-Soviet region, scholars of authoritarianism, and those interested in anti-corruptionism more broadly. The sheer variety of theoretical possibilities discussed in this paper suggests, for instance, that simply identifying the direction of anti-corruption’s impact on electoral regime support is insufficient for understanding how it actually works. This is because some mechanisms represent fundamentally different social processes (e.g., popular evaluations of regime fairness and regime performance or popular attitudes to punitiveness or corruption itself) and because only when mechanisms are analyzed distinctly yet in relation to each other can the analyses generate a sufficiently nuanced picture.

Another important implication is that anti-corruption scholars cannot uncritically transfer their findings from democracies to non-democratic regimes because, conceivably, mechanisms like Fear and Skepticism are either implausible or would have different electoral outcomes in political systems with free elections. Moreover, the contrast between the effects of anti-corruptionism orchestrated by Beijing (as reported by scholars like Zhang 2015 and Zhao 2016) and the effects that we document in Russia suggests that researchers should further systematically assess how the type of authoritarian regime (e.g., personalist vs. party-based, competitive vs. non-competitive, etc.) shapes the impact of its policies on popular political attitudes and behaviors.

For area scholars, our findings raise a fascinating question of why Putin’s efforts have been so much less successful than the efforts of his Chinese counterpart, President Xi. There are several possibilities. The impact of Xi Jinping’s and Vladimir Putin’s anti-corruption enforcement might have been different due to dissimilarities in the foci of their respective campaigns. By all accounts, for instance, Chinese prosecutions targeted “tigers”, or high-level officials, more vigorously than prosecutions in Russia, where anti-corruptionism against the elites was notably more selective. They also may reflect the difference in contextual factors, such as the timing of anti-corruption enforcement, since China’s began following a high-profile corruption scandal involving Chen Liangyu (Zhang 2015), while Russia’s started after the opposition had already mobilized around the issue of corruption. This could have underscored the political intent of Putin’s efforts. Alternatively, the differences between the two countries may mean that Russia’s propaganda machine is simply less effective in touting the anti-corruption success of its leaders.

Regardless, however, Putin’s inability to effectively co-opt anti-corruption reforms adds to the growing list of domestic issues that the president has tried and failed to use to legitimate his power. From the speedy development of the Sputnik V vaccine to generous welfare allocations, Putin’s efforts at home have not been nearly as effective at raising popular support for his regime as have his claims regarding external threats to national security. Putin’s fizzling anti-corruption efforts in recent years, alongside the aggressive prosecution then imprisonment of the late Alexei Navalny, likely indicate the administration’s realization that Kremlin will not beat the opposition “at its own game” and that attempts to do so might hurt rather than help its popularity. Alarmingly, they also indicate that the late stages of Putin’s rule are likely to be characterized by fewer attempts at substantive changes to status quo, such as economic modernization and meaningful administrative reform, and heavier reliance on force and intimidation.