Political awareness, corruption perceptions and democratic accountability in Latin America

Social scientists have demonstrated how transparency and democratic accountability can help control political corruption. Whereas this research has had much to say about how an open media environment produces constraints on politicians, the problem of how a politically ignorant public can enforce accountability has received much less attention. In this article, I argue that effective citizen monitoring of government officials depends on accurate corruption perceptions, which depends on the degree to which citizens are politically informed. An analysis of 10 Latin American countries with varied levels of corruption shows that better informed individuals have more accurate perceptions, even if, like their less informed neighbors, they still tend to underestimate the amount of corruption in their societies. The importance of citizen political awareness in the analysis strongly suggests that policy recommendations targeting corruption control feature tools that increase civic engagement along with those that increase government transparency and press freedoms. Acta Politica (2012) 47, 67-90. doi:10.1057/ap.2011.21; published online 12 August 2011