It’s a matter of trust : corruption scandals and political discontent in pandemic times

Abstract

We study how corruption scandals lead to different forms of political discontent. We take advantage of the fact that the largest corruption scandal during the pandemic in Peru (the vacungate scandal) erupted during the fieldwork of a public opinion survey and use the quasi-exogenous variation in exposure to the corruption scandal arising from differences in interview dates across respondent. We find that the vacunagate scandal triggered a sizable increase in the perception of corruption, reduced trust in both national and local governments, and changed the perception of democracy as a suitable political system. These short-run effects are significantly higher among those directly affected by this disease. We also show that our results are robust to placebo test, changes in the bandwidth used, and an alternative model specification.