Using surveys conducted in sixteen mature and newly established democracies around the globe, this study examines the effect of corruption on people's attitudes toward government. The analysis demonstrates that citizens in countries with higher levels of corruption express more negative evaluations of the performance of the political system and exhibit lower levels of trust in civil servants. However, the results also show that the negative effect of corruption on evaluations of the political system is significantly attenuated among supporters of the incumbent political authorities. These findings provide strong and systematic evidence that informal political practices, especially those that compromise important democratic principles, should be considered important indicators of political system performance. Moreover, they imply that, while corruption is a powerful determinant of political support across widely varying political, cultural, and economic contexts, it does not uniformly diminish support for political institutions across all segments of the electorate.

The article compares the effect of political majority and minority status on attitudes toward government in mature and newly established democracies. Specifically, it examines whether being in the majority translates into more positive attitudes toward government than being in the minority. Using surveys conducted by the International Social Survey Project (ISSP) in 12 democracies in 1996, it finds that being in the majority generally translates into more positive attitudes toward government. However, this effect is not of uniform magnitude across countries, nor does it affect all attitudes toward government equally. Specifically, the data show that being in the political majority or minority strongly affects attitudes toward the performance of the political system and the power of government, but does not affect people's levels of political efficacy in systematic ways.

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Using panel surveys conducted in Great Britain before and after the 1997 general election, we examine the relationship between voting behavior and post-election economic perceptions. Drawing on psychological theories of attitude formation, we argue that those who voted for Labour and the Liberal Democrats perceived the past state of the British economy under the Tory government more negatively than they had prior to casting their ballot in the 1997 election. Similarly, we posit that Labour supporters would view the future state of the national economy under Labour more positively than they had before the election. This indicates that, contrary to many assumptions in the economic voting literature, voting behavior influences evaluations of the economy as voters seek to reduce inconsistencies between their vote choice and evaluations of the economy by bringing their attitudes in line with the vote they cast in the election. It also means that voters' post-election economic perceptions are, at least in part, influenced by and thus endogenous to their vote choice. This finding has two major implications: First, cross-sectional models of economic voting are likely to overestimate the effect of economic perceptions on the vote. Second, the endogeneity of economic perceptions may compromise the quality of economic voting as a mechanism for democratic accountability.

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