Earlier this year, veteran political writer Thomas Edsall reported an eyebrow-raising fact about Americans’ views toward government. Polling by Gallup, he noted, found that the proportion of Americans who believed that corruption is “widespread” in government had risen from 59 percent in 2006 to 79 percent in 2013. “In other words,” Edsall wrote, “we were cynical already, but now we’re in overdrive.”
Given the blanket coverage devoted to public officials charged with selling their influence, this shouldn’t be surprising. Former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife were convicted last month of violating public corruption laws. Former mayors Ray Nagin of New Orleans and Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit were good for months of headlines. So were Republican Rep. Rick Renzi, convicted last year on influence-peddling charges, and Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who pled guilty to charges of misusing campaign funds.
If you add state and local officials who cross the line, it might seem that we’re awash in corruption. Yet as political scientist Larry Sabato told The New York Times, that’s more perception than reality. “I’ve studied American political corruption throughout the 19th and 20th centuries,” he said, “and, if anything, corruption was much more common in much of those centuries than today.”
