A recently published study by Arnstein Aassve, Gianmarco Daniele, and Marco Le Moglie reminds us that 23% of national MPs and a staggering 75% of MPs from the then ruling Christian Democrat and Socialist parties were charged with corruption in those years and the 1994 electoral campaign was centered on this topic. Political corruption, completely missing on Italian TV news up to then, became the most salient topic both in TV news and newspapers (with almost 90% of the front pages covering the scandal in 1993).

Using data from Trustlab, an effort coordinated by the OECD to collect nationally representative data of trust and political beliefs in a comparative setting, the scholars find that Italian first-time voters in 1994 were 9% more likely to vote for populist parties in 2018 (according to their self-reported behavior) and recorded lower institutional trust (i.e. trust in parliament, government and civil servants). Their trust in bodies not immediately related to the Clean Hands scandal (police, media, and financial institutions) and their social trust (trust towards other individuals) were unaffected.

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