Exploring Tolerance Towards Corruption in the European Union Through Experienced Corruption, Perceived Corruption and Institutional Trust

Corruption is a major problem that undermines the foundations of democracy and reduces citizens' trust in institutions. However, even in the world's most advanced countries, citizens accept certain levels of corruption. This tolerance towards corruption (TC) reduces the impact of anti‐corruption actions and ends up giving a patina of normality to some corrupt behaviour. Therefore, lowering TC is an important challenge to be faced in the fight against corruption. However, TC is an understudied phenomenon in the literature, with three main gaps: (1) TC has more often been approached as an explanatory variable for other phenomena than as a central variable in the analysis, (2) most of the research studying TC focused on a single country and a single period, which only shows a narrow and static view of the problem and (3) studies are more concerned with knowing the impact of individuals' socio‐demographic characteristics on TC than on understanding how their experience of corruption or their personal perceptions of it may affect it. This paper addresses these gaps by analysing, for the 27‐EU countries over the period 2013–2022, the extent to which TC may depend on (1) experienced corruption, (2) perceived corruption and (3) personal perceptions of the anti‐corruption crackdown. The paper explores the differences among the 27‐EU countries and also takes into account the temporal evolution of TC by analysing whether there are differences before and after the COVID‐19 pandemic. This paper provides strong evidence that the greater the exposure to corruption, the greater the TC in all the time scenarios considered, which could eventually lead to a very dangerous vicious circle effect. However, no evidence is found in favour of above relations 2 and 3, nor of significant differences between before and after the pandemic. These findings highlight the importance for policymakers and other authorities to devise corrective measures to prevent citizens from being exposed to corruption by promoting a culture of zero TC.