Americans agree on corruption, but partisanship shapes who is blamed

Americans agree on remarkably little these days, but they largely agree on what corruption looks like. Taking a campaign contribution in exchange for a vote? Corrupt. Using public office to enrich yourself? Corrupt. Changing election rules to help your party win, or using federal agencies against political opponents? Large majorities call those corrupt too, even when explicitly told that no law has been broken.

The harder question is what happens when Americans learn who is doing it. Our recent UMass Poll suggests an uncomfortable answer. Americans possess fairly robust norms about the proper use of public power, but partisanship can substantially alter how they apply those norms. The same conduct looks much more corrupt when the president committing it belongs to the other party. Yet our findings also reveal something more encouraging: Across party lines, Americans still overwhelmingly want institutions to investigate public officials who abuse their power.

Many Americans believe Washington is rife with corruption. When we asked voters how much corruption they believe exists in the federal government today, 75% said “a great deal” and another 22% said “some.” Unlike many political issues where we see significant gender, class, generational, or racial divides, we see near unanimity across these groups on perceptions of corruption. Even majorities of Republicans (69%) and Democrats (81%) report that they see a great deal of corruption in Washington. Such widespread agreement is highly unusual in American politics today.

It is also unusual in recent history. Gallup has been asking U.S. adults a slightly different question over time: Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not? Eighty-nine percent of Americans say “yes,” up from 59% in 2006. Much of this surge is from Democrats, who rose from 57% in 2024, when Biden was still president, to 91% this year. Gallup also reports that the U.S. is well above the median level of perceived corruption among the advanced economies of the OECD, and in 2025 it ranked highest of all member countries for the first time, surpassing nations like Greece, Hungary, and the Czech Republic that once held that dubious distinction.

Not surprisingly, 90% of Americans say illegal self-dealing—such as officials breaking the law to financially benefit themselves or their family—is corrupt. However, our findings indicate that Americans view corruption more broadly than the boundaries of the law. When we explicitly tell people that no law has been broken, they still overwhelmingly call behaviors that look like abuse of power corrupt—both Democrats and Republicans equally.

Not all acts are viewed as equally corrupt, however. As Figure 1 shows, the public ranks quid pro quo exchanges as most corrupt, followed by examples of (legal) abuses of power, and lastly some murkier practices that are routine in American politics. 

Overall, 78% of Americans think providing a vote in exchange for a political contribution is extremely/very corrupt. Seventy-three percent see the use of power to help yourself win elections as corrupt, and 65% view using federal agencies against your political opponents similarly.

These figures indicate that Americans don’t assign the corruption label only to enrichment while in office. Their perception of corruption also includes manipulating the rules of democratic competition for partisan advantage. In other words, Americans’ conception of corruption extends beyond money. For most of them, corruption can also mean using government to entrench yourself in power.

But on these types of issues, we begin to see evidence of partisan divides—even as large majorities agree. Republicans are 13 percentage points less likely than Democrats to view changing the rules to help their party as corrupt and 20 percentage points less likely than Democrats to see corruption when using federal power to investigate opponents. Both are acts that President Donald Trump has engaged in during his second term. These results suggest that partisan attachments shape assessments of corruption, raising normative concerns about democratic accountability.

Among all Americans, 57% of voters are concerned about contributors getting greater access to officeholders, and 43% believe it is corrupt when officials get a lucrative job after leaving office. These are potentially offensive but common acts, and more Americans appear to accept them as part of the institutional landscape.

So, Americans largely agree on what corruption is in principle. But partisanship becomes a powerful filter in specific cases. To better understand when partisanship shapes perceptions of corruption, we fielded a survey experiment where we held the corrupt behavior of a president constant but changed only the partisanship of the president in question and asked respondents to assess whether the behavior was corrupt or not corrupt. Half the sample was told that a Democratic president directed federal agencies to investigate prominent Republicans, and the other half saw exactly the same scenario with a Republican president targeting Democrats.

Figure 2 illustrates that both parties judge a president of the opposing party more harshly, but the partisan double standard was much larger among Republicans. Democrats’ assessments shifted by 30 points depending on the president’s party (48% for an in-party president to 78% for the out-party); Republicans’ shifted by 42 points (22% to 64%). Strikingly, fewer than one-quarter of Republicans regarded the conduct as highly corrupt when committed by a Republican president. For independents, the partisanship of the president had very little effect on perceptions. Regrettably, democratic accountability rests considerably on which team is doing the corrupting.

To understand how partisanship gets applied to different institutions of government, we also asked people to rank four parts of the federal government from most to least corrupt. Overall, 53% put the presidency first, followed by the federal bureaucracy at 23%, Congress at 18%, and the Supreme Court at 7%.

But the aggregate numbers conceal an extraordinary partisan divide, seen in Figure 3. Eighty-seven percent of Democrats locate the greatest corruption in the presidency. Republicans overwhelmingly locate it elsewhere: 44% bureaucracy, 30% Congress, and only 18% presidency. For Republicans, political rhetoric from party leaders about the “deep state” appears to make them see the bureaucracy as more crooked than other parts of government. Meanwhile, independents appear to see the presidency as most corrupt (51%), followed by Congress (22%) and the federal bureaucracy (19%). Overall, and among Republicans and independents, the Supreme Court is the institution least often named as the most corrupt.

Finally, one silver lining we take from this poll is that Americans do not want to rely simply on the next election to throw out corrupt actors. Partisanship may powerfully shape whether Americans acknowledge corruption in particular cases, but they largely agree in general cases that politicians should be held accountable. When an official trades a vote for a campaign contribution, 86% favor either a criminal or ethics investigation; 85% say the same when an official uses public office to make a profitable personal investment, and 81% favor an investigation when a president uses federal agencies against political opponents. Relatively few respondents say these matters should simply be left to voters.

Moreover, Figure 4 shows support for investigation crosses party lines: Even in the more politically charged case of targeting opponents, 85% of Democrats, 77% of Republicans, and 80% of independents favor a criminal or ethics investigation. The broader finding is that most Americans see a role for institutional accountability, not just electoral accountability, when they encounter conduct they regard as corrupt.

Perceptions of corruption are clearly elevated among Americans, but we should be careful about what that means. The increases have preceded Donald Trump presidencies, although Gallup’s data illustrate how his second term has radically affected Democratic perceptions of corruption in government. Some of this likely reflects the familiar pattern of the party out of power becoming more distrustful in an increasingly polarized environment. But the findings should not simply be written off as partisan sour grapes. Americans in both parties have a broad conception of corruption, and they clearly want accountability when public officials cross ethical or legal lines.

Because Americans broadly agree about what constitutes corruption in principle, but apply those standards differently when partisan identities become salient, reformers should focus on nonpartisan framing and designs. Reforms framed around particular politicians or partisan controversies may have difficulty securing broad public support. And rather than chasing the latest scandal (which will be tied to a partisan official), reformers should focus on the structural weaknesses that these scandals expose, establishing rules that apply regardless of which party controls government. Our findings identify a foundation for such efforts. There is broad agreement that using public office for personal enrichment, exchanging official favors for campaign contributions, and manipulating government power for partisan advantage constitute corruption.

American history offers precedents for this approach. The Pendleton Act responded to scandals surrounding the spoils system by addressing an underlying institutional weakness, which was the dependence of public employment on partisan patronage. It established a merit-based civil service intended to place much of the federal workforce beyond routine partisan control. Following Watergate, Congress likewise responded to particular abuses by addressing broader vulnerabilities in campaign finance, government transparency, executive power, and public ethics. In both cases, scandal provided the impetus for reform, but the reforms addressed institutional weaknesses that extended beyond the immediate scandal.

One principle for reform is to separate independent fact-finding from the necessarily political process of accountability. The House already provides one model. Its Office of Congressional Conduct (OCC), created in 2008 and formerly known as the Office of Congressional Ethics, is an independent body governed by private citizens that investigates allegations against House members. It refers cases to the bipartisan House Ethics Committee, which retains responsibility for determining violations and imposing sanctions. According to the Campaign Legal Center, OCC appears to be nonpartisan in how it operates—investigating Republicans and Democrats at roughly equal rates. It has improved transparency and helped make the House Ethics Committee more active. The Senate has no comparable independent investigative body. Senators themselves investigate allegations against their colleagues through the Senate Ethics Committee. A similar division of labor could strengthen accountability elsewhere in government.

Congress could also reinforce protections for agency inspectors general against politically motivated dismissal and strengthen the Office of Government Ethics, which should provide central leadership among the many ethics units across agencies. Stronger financial disclosure requirements and mandatory reviews of potential conflicts of interest could also reduce reliance on partisan officials to decide which allegations deserve scrutiny. These institutions must remain accountable, but they should be protected as much as possible from interference by the political actors they investigate.

None of these reforms can eliminate partisanship from accountability. But they can make it harder for political allies to look the other way when their own side abuses power. The goal is not to overcome polarization, but to build institutions capable of holding public officials accountable despite it.