Now wait, let not be too hasty here. We should whiteboard this out. There are a lot of moving parts, and shutting down an idea too soon, would be wrong.
So to start, uh, just wondering, which politicians? Also, what would they be wearing?
Again, only asking for an accurate framing here.
I'm more worried about the fact that humans are, collectively at least, so hypocritical.
For the following examples, bare in mind that neither I nor the general public understand the actual laws, so any nits you pick need to be the kind that even a non-lawyer will accept:
I'm old enough to remember Clinton being impeached for lying about his affairs, and yet Republicans (collectively) are defending Trump for lying about affairs.
Or vice versa, Trump's classified documents at home vs. Biden's.
Probably the same elsewhere, but I don't trust that I'm not part of the problem with regard to UK politics (where I'm from), and my German isn't good enough to pay attention to what's happening where I now live.
Humans are violent too. If we tried as hard to train it out of people we'd make good progress.
The old Ted Kennedy maneuver
On both sides. It's all theater like WWE. You have the good guy and you have the heel. Each side has their own story with this format.
This is fundamental to loss aversion and compromise. There was never a "before." Open "negotiations" reward posturing, not compromise.
I also challenge the notion that higher pay leads to less corruption. If so, then why are Denmark, Finland, New Zealand and Norway ranked higher in the corruption perception index[1], when they are paid much, much less annually (especially Finland)[2]?
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022 (https://archive.ph/fabjP)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_salaries_of_heads_of_s... (https://archive.ph/XGbpO)
Of course it's hard to find the "actual corruption" figures, but that doesn't mean the perceptions index is of any value.
These are surveys, so there's a limit to how reliable their results can be. However, I find surveys are a pretty good start when you need to get a general idea on how something does and you can't just measure it. How you value that is up to you, that's why I quote it in my comment.
But on this particular index, I strongly suspect it is simply continuing existing biases. It's the thing people quote and by quoting it you get reinforce next year's rankings. Plus it's the kind of thing nobody can ever verify due to its nature.
On a side note, it might be interesting to see the evolution of this index over the years for any given country; that might lead to interesting conclusions on the bias confirmation you're talking about!