Abstract
Citizens’ ability to hold corrupt politicians accountable is a key feature of demo-cratic political systems. Particularly in the European Union (EU), such account-ability mechanisms are often argued to malfunction due to the EU’s complicatedinstitutional architecture and in-transparent democratic procedures. Contributingto the debate on the EU’s democratic deficit, we provide quasi-experimental evi-dence on the causal effect of a recent corruption scandal in the European Parliament.Leveraging an ‘Unexpected Event during Survey Design’ identification strategy inFrance and Germany, we document a sizable negative effect of the so-called Qatar-gate scandal on public trust in the European Parliament. This provides evidencein favor of a working accountability mechanism in the EU’s democratic politicalsystem
Original language | English |
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Publisher | OSF Preprints |
Number of pages | 17 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 6 Mar 2023 |
Keywords
- accountability
- corruption
- European Parliament
- political trust
- Qatargate