This article studies the relationship between the degree of populist or pluralist rhetoric employed by governments, and how it affects the perception of anticorruption effectiveness from its citizens. By combining data from the 2021 Global Corruption Barometer survey and from the 2020 Global Party Survey, a consolidated dataset is created, including information on the degree of populist rhetoric employed, corruption approval scores, as well as socio-demographic and country-level data for each ruling government from the 47 countries. Using multilevel logistic regression analysis of the 52,925 responses from 47 countries in the dataset, the article determines that pluralist governments have higher odds of being perceived as better at handling corruption, by comparison to populist governments.