Abigail Bellows served as the director for anti-corruption on the U.S. National Security Council staff.
As U.S. pro-democracy groups respond to the surge of executive overreach that has defined President Donald Trump’s second presidential term, many have focused on defensive strategies, particularly litigation. Others are advancing legislation to bolster accountability or analyzing markers of democratic erosion. But as scholars like Rachel Kleinfeld have argued, the pro-democracy movement also needs a bold and proactive communications strategy. Such a strategy should focus not on technical and procedural democracy issues but rather on emotionally salient issues that trigger disgust, concern, or cognitive dissonance. Compelling and accessible communications strategies can help pro-democracy groups reach new centrist audiences, while strengthening the sector’s legitimacy at a time of shrinking civic space.
Across the ideological spectrum, pro-democracy groups are starting to develop narratives for public consumption that can serve as the foundation of effective communications strategies. Early efforts include the Metropolitan Group’s new research identifying core values, like freedom and fairness, that may appeal to the public more than the abstract concept of democracy. FrameWorks Institute has identified relevant cultural mindsets—such as equating voting with democracy—that shape the American narrative landscape, while the Horizons Project has disseminated pro-democracy narrative practices from countries with intense polarization. The newly launched Democracy Narratives Campaign brings together organizations from across the world to develop narratives that increase public support for democracy. And the Democracy Communications Collaborative is convening and coordinating across this growing field.
As this pro-democracy communications infrastructure develops, practitioners would be wise to robustly incorporate narratives around corruption. Even in autocratic countries, theft of public resources sparks protests like few other grievances do. In fact, research by Carnegie’s Thomas Carothers and Oliver Stuenkel has found that heightened corruption has been one of the main drivers of regime change globally for the past ten years. However, ramping up communications on corruption also comes with serious risks: Audiences may become fatalistic about the prospects of change, contributing to apathy, acquiescence, or authoritarianism. To mitigate these risks, communicators should seek to advance corruption solutions, rather than just stoking outrage. They also must navigate the variable definitions of corruption, in light of the mismatch between how advocates tend to talk about corruption—narrowly as economic crime—and the way many Americans talk about corruption—as a wider problem of unfairness, inequality, and government inefficiency. This article offers recommendations for how to approach this thorny communications task, based on lessons learned from around the world.
Benefits and Risks of Corruption Communications
As commentators and politicians seek to reach new audiences, some are already seeking to harness corruption grievances. Rahm Emanuel advocated for doing so in a December 2024 episode of the Ezra Klein Show titled “It’s the Corruption, Stupid,” and Senator Chris Murphy has advanced similar notions. And for good reason. Nonpartisan experts have sounded the alarm on recent actions that weaken the U.S. anti-corruption architecture, both domestically and internationally. Even right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson recently expressed concern over potentially corrupt deal-making. In the coming months, there are likely to be further attempts to capture, concretize, and communicate to the American people the costs of corruption.
Heightened messaging around corruption is appealing but risky. A recent report found that of twenty-seven corruption-focused messages, tested across ten countries, almost half of them backfired, meaning they registered an unwanted impact on public attitudes. Even upbeat messaging campaigns that reference progress in combating corruption can inadvertently prompt audiences to recall long-standing beliefs that corruption is endemic and intractable, reinforcing a perception of government as irredeemably broken and leading to greater civic apathy, corruption, or antidemocratic politics.
American Views on Corruption
The global risks noted above also apply to the United States, where concern about corruption is already quite high. One recent survey found that a majority of Americans view the government as “corrupt and rigged against [them],” while another poll found that a full three-quarters of Americans believe the government is “corrupt.” A 2022 poll found that Americans rank corruption as their biggest democracy concern—above voter fraud, political violence, and the actions of specific politicians. Seven in ten Americans think the government “mainly works to benefit powerful elites” rather than “ordinary people.” And a 2024 survey found that Americans’ fear of corrupt government officials topped the chart for the tenth year in a row, outranking respondents’ fear of war, economic instability, the death of a loved one, or terrorism.
The startling breadth of this sentiment points to the potential that corruption communication in the United States could backfire if not done carefully. Experts often think of government as largely clean, marred by a few instances of illegal corruption. Meanwhile, many Americans see corruption as much more widespread. This could be due to an overestimation driven by media coverage. But it is equally likely to stem from a broader definition of the term among the general public that captures a sense of economic and social grievance and disappointment in the American dream. In this more expansive view, problems like inequality, economic immobility, and poor public services stem not simply from ineffective governance but deliberately corrupt governance: politicians and bureaucrats who are in it for themselves or beholden to special interests—a state that has been captured by elites. The fact that much of this perceived corruption is legal is further evidence of the heist. For many Americans, corruption is simply shorthand for the unfairness and injustice of so-called public servants who are out to serve themselves.
The two definitions of corruption sit in tension with one another: the first, a narrow sense of economic crime, the other, an all-encompassing sense of rupture in the social contract. Advocates tackling the former may find themselves talking past audiences concerned with the latter, making it harder to build the kind of member-driven organizations essential to addressing corruption grievances. Americans’ despairing views about corruption help explain recent survey results, such as a 2024 poll that found that “among Americans who think corruption is a very serious problem in the U.S., more approve of Trump’s (44%) handling of the issue than Biden’s (26%).” Respondents may be using the term “corruption” to refer to state capture by elites, which explains why procedural violations (such as Trump companies’ past convictions on tax fraud) or technical progress (such as former president Joe Biden’s strides in closing money-laundering loopholes) matter less than Trump’s populist and anti-system messaging.
Given this fraught narrative landscape, communicating on corruption could cause Americans to lose trust in politicians across the political spectrum—harming democracy instead of strengthening it. To avoid this trap, advocates must understand the top three pitfalls of anti-corruption communication.
Civic Apathy: Disengaging From the System
Communicators are frequently tempted to try to motivate public action by highlighting the severity of corruption. However, a 2023 study from FHI 360 found that such attempts, when not directly coupled with a sense of efficacy in addressing the problem, can do more harm than good. As in the public health domain, fear-based messaging often produces resignation, fatigue, and hopelessness. In the political domain, this sense of resignation translates to disengagement from political participation.
Preexisting beliefs matter. Messaging seems to backfire most with those who are already pessimistic about the prevalence of corruption in their country. In the U.S. context, this would track with those on the far left and far right, where skepticism with status quo politics is strongest. High perceptions of corruption also likely correlate with low levels of education and income, as these groups express little trust in government. U.S. research indicates that messaging that reinforces voters’ cynicism about governance leads to lower voter turnout. By implication, raising awareness of government corruption among low-power communities could depress electoral participation—precisely the opposite of what many pro-democracy groups seek to do.
Playing the Game: Deepening Corruption in the System
Another risk is that messaging that triggers preexisting beliefs about the inevitability of corruption may nudge audiences to engage in corruption themselves, as the only plausible path to compete on an uneven playing field. A study from Nigeria found that exposure to counter-corruption messaging made participants more—rather than less—likely to go with the flow of bribe-paying, apparently because they assumed it was the only way to get ahead.
Relatedly, talking about politicians’ corruption may increase, rather than decrease, support for them. Research from India has examined why people vote for politicians with criminal backgrounds, a phenomenon that has also been observed in parts of the United States. Rather than being due to voter ignorance, as was previously posited, it appears this phenomenon persists due to voters’ conviction that criminal politicians can more credibly protect a given community than a clean competitor. If voters already see the system as rigged—as many Americans do—then a wily politician who can deftly navigate the system on behalf of a certain group could be appealing. In such a setting, rule-breaking (such as not paying one’s taxes) serves as evidence of a politician’s smarts in circumventing an already-rigged system. Thus, communicators should not assume that exposing conduct that is technically illegal will stoke outrage; in fact, it could inadvertently increase the popular appeal of those actors. Americans’ trust in government has plateaued around 22 percent, giving rise to the kind of patronage politics that prizes playing the game to the advantage of select groups.
Anti-Corruption Becomes Anti-Politics: Blowing Up the System
Thirdly, frustration with corruption can harden into disdain for the entire political establishment, giving rise to extremist political factions. The most vivid example is Brazil in the wake of the Lava Jato prosecutions, which purged politicians from across the political spectrum. This made way for Jair Bolsonaro to successfully capitalize on political disgust in his 2018 presidential campaign. Authoritarian populists have done the same in Hungary, the Philippines, and El Salvador. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi was elected prime minister after the Clean Hands corruption investigations of the 1990s destroyed the credibility of the entire political establishment.
Once elected, populists rarely remedy the institutional failures that have propelled their rise to power. Instead, populist governments tend to undercut the structures of public accountability that form the ballast of anti-corruption progress. In fact, studies have found that after four years in office, populist leadership typically results in more executive corruption, owing to weakened judicial and legislative constraints. Authoritarian actors routinely invoke anti-corruption rhetoric to undermine trust in democratic institutions, while simultaneously engaging in corruption to retain their respective grips on power.
Recommended Approaches
In light of these substantial pitfalls, how can communicators harness the benefits of increased corruption messaging while appropriately navigating the risk? Communicators should strive to illustrate the stakes of corruption and, just as importantly, the near-term opportunities to combat it. Conveying to audiences a sense of agency will help counteract fatalism and resignation.
The Stakes: Why Corruption Matters and Why Now
Narrative strategies should make vivid the human costs of corruption. In settings like the United States, where the main challenge lies with grand corruption and state capture, those costs can be more difficult to pinpoint than in places rife with graft at the level of everyday public services. Thus, illustrating the real-world impacts of elite corruption on food safety, infrastructure, housing affordability, and so on, is vital.
Advocates also need to help audiences differentiate between baseline corruption and a growing threat that experts argue is massively expanding in both scope and scale. In the United States, many constituencies view corruption as a long-standing problem, which communicators must acknowledge lest they appear to be supporting a social contract that those communities believe has failed them. Yet only emphasizing corruption’s enduring nature, without providing a sense of scale, will reinforce perceptions that corruption is intractable (and therefore hopeless). In contrast, messaging that highlights how U.S. corruption risk has skyrocketed in recent months suggests the potential to reverse that slide. Similarly, messaging that helps audiences differentiate between the track record of various public officials disrupts notions that all politicians are equally corrupt—again, suggesting the possibility of reform. Corrupt actors will seek to reinforce false equivalencies—between politicians and between the corruption of the past and today—leaving it to advocates and journalists to point out departures from the norm and the need for timely action.
The Opportunity: Taking Action Against Corruption Is Within Reach
In settings like the United States, where the population already has an alarmingly high perception of government corruption, sensitizing them to the stakes of the problem is relatively easy. The harder, and more important, narrative theme is agency and hope: to convince audiences there are feasible actions they can take to measurably improve the situation. Lessons from the field of health behavior change demonstrate that raising perceptions of risk without providing an immediate pathway toward positive remedy causes individuals to dismiss the message, while the combination of increased risk plus increased efficacy spurs action.
One way to puncture the normalization of corruption while offering hope can be through summoning historical antecedents. For instance, communicators could point to the ethics reforms of the U.S. Progressive Era or the post-Watergate period and draw out the impacts the resulting reforms had in restraining self-dealing. Another approach can be comparative examples where corruption has been more effectively controlled. For example, comparative research from the Topos Partnership on anti-corruption messaging in the United States found success in drawing out subnational contrasts, such as:
“Boston used to be famously corrupt, but now ranks as one of the cleanest, best-run cities in the country. What happened? Massachusetts has been enacting laws that other places like Chicago haven’t. For example, it’s a crime for officials to accept a gift of more than $50, or to vote on issues where they have a conflict of interest.”
This comparison offers hope, pointing to concrete reforms that can make a difference.
Communicators can also integrate pro-democracy themes into their narratives to inoculate against authoritarian attempts to sow distrust in democracy. For example, the Topos Partnership recommends using framing such as: “We get good government, serving the people, when we have good, strong laws and double-checks to make sure of it. We get bad, corrupt government when we let one man fire the inspectors and say, ‘I’ll be the oversight.’” This framing reinforces the idea that the solution to corruption is more democracy, not less.
As with many communications campaigns, anti-corruption advocates should seek to include a call to action where appropriate. Global lessons indicate that such calls should be:
- Ambitious. In settings like the United States where perceptions of corruption are high, calls for incremental policy fixes are unlikely to gain support. Instead, communicators should draw from shared values to advance a bold vision that is proportionate to the American public’s damning diagnosis of the problem. This vision should ultimately address both the narrow definition of corruption as economic crime—through new institutional guardrails—as well as the broader definition of corruption as a rigged system—through interventions that remedy wider economic and social grievances. In that vein, Metropolitan Group recommends anti-corruption groups adopt framing that calls for “a government that answers to the people,” where “no one is above the law,” and where “public resources go toward education, health care, and infrastructure instead of being diverted to the rich and powerful.” This framing speaks to both the narrow and broad definitions of corruption, while advancing a positive vision of the future.
- Systemic. Rather than just ousting individual corrupt actors, campaigns should press for enduring guardrails that will curb future corruption risk. This requires advocates to coalesce around a nonpartisan platform of anti-corruption reforms, such as laws requiring the president to divest from personal business interests while in office, disclose tax returns, and not interfere with Justice Department investigations. It requires discipline to avoid defaulting into heavily personalized or politicized framing of corruption (for example, “Biden’s corruption” or “Trump’s corruption”). Such framings may earn short-term spikes in member engagement but typically lose momentum after the emotional peak of a political transition. Once the person who has become synonymous with corruption is gone, civil society tends to demobilize. Yet advocacy must persist, as political transitions do not automatically remedy kleptocratic vulnerabilities. Moreover, messaging that focuses on one small set of corrupt acts or actors—or pins all hopes on a more benevolent politician—are likely to fall flat.
- Feasible. Calls to action should impart a sense of agency, identifying realistic entry points to start uprooting corruption. This may involve action at the local level, such as the ethics and democracy candidate pledges being piloted in Virginia, or by advancing a concrete step toward national reform. In other cases, it might involve rallying public involvement in a norm-shifting campaign, such as Integrity Icon, which names and fames government officials demonstrating integrity (rather than naming and shaming corrupt actors).
Taken together, communications that convey both the stakes of the problem and the possibility of addressing it can galvanize action. As research on rule-of-law communications in the United Kingdom has found, narratives should “balance urgency (we need to act) with efficacy (we can act) in both tone and content.”
Moving to Action: Implementing New Narrative Approaches
As communicators craft narrative campaigns focused on corruption, it is vital to clarify early on the specific goal of such campaigns. How does a particular campaign aim to alter beliefs or induce a new action?
Global lessons point to five additional recommendations for successful corruption narrative campaigns:
- Tailoring. Orient messaging toward specific audiences and seek resonance with their long-held values. Tailoring is particularly important given the risk that corruption messaging may deepen authoritarian leanings among audiences already despairing about corruption’s prevalence. As such, researchers recommend against indiscriminate mass media messaging on corruption, in favor of targeting those with less pessimistic views of government, who are less vulnerable to the pitfalls of corruption messaging and more likely to take constructive action.
- Terms. Rather than relying solely on the term corruption—whose meaning in the United States is nearly as contested and varied as democracy—clear communications will describe what is meant by corruption (for example, fraud, abuse of public office, stealing the people’s money, a system rigged for elites, and so on). Messages may rely on sharp contrasts (“they are getting rich, while our schools are getting poorer”) or stories that illustrate the human impacts of corruption.
- Transmission. Communicators must consider how to reach key constituencies, especially in a polarized media landscape. This landscape may require dissemination of messaging beyond traditional communications platforms, as has been done in Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Mexico, where activists have created public art spectacles out of opulent corruption as a way to spark public conversation. In Malawi, faith leaders became outspoken anti-corruption champions, while in South Africa, justice officials educated the public through a Commission of Inquiry on State Capture. These creative modalities should be combined with thoughtful consideration of the messenger most likely to have credibility with a particular target audience.
- Timing. Research indicates that people may be “more open to updating their beliefs” during times when they are experiencing change in their environments or welfare. This suggests opportunities to target messages toward communities that are undergoing change and to act quickly when galvanizing moments emerge. For example, Tino Cuèllar and Matthew Stephenson point out that the 1881 murder of then president James Garfield—shot by a disgruntled man who had expected a patronage appointment that did not come through—was blamed by reformists on the spoils system. Their resulting activism culminated in the enactment, two years later, of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act.
- Testing. Given the risk of unintended consequences in corruption communications, it is particularly important to test messaging before deploying it, whether via focus groups, surveys, or experimental methods. Communicators should also design a plan to monitor and evaluate impact after deploying a narrative campaign, so that they can iterate or scale their strategies as appropriate.
As U.S. pro-democracy advocates contend with democratic erosion, they are wise to highlight growing patterns and risks of corruption within the United States, which is likely to have widespread resonance with the U.S. public. To prevent corruption messaging from fueling strongman politics or public apathy, exposing corruption should be complemented by showcasing solutions that foster hope and agency. Doing so can generate the momentum needed to erect better guardrails against future corruption and start rebuilding faith in democracy.
About the Author
Abigail Bellows served as the director for anti-corruption on the U.S. National Security Council staff and previously advised senior officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development, the State Department, and the Department of Defense. Bellows has also consulted for global philanthropies, worked as a community organizer, and written on democracy topics for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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