Essays on Political Corruption

Abstract

This dissertation presents three essays offering explanations for the persistence of corruption despite electoral competition.

The first essay, co-authored with Adam Glynn and Nahomi Ichino, asks what the effect of electoral systems is on corruption. Persson, Tabellini and Trebbi (2003) proposed that plurality electoral systems should lead to lower corruption compared to proportional representation (PR) systems because the former creates a direct link between voters and politicians whom voters can hold accountable for corruption. The empirical question re- mains unresolved, however, in part due to the endogeneity of the electoral institutions and difficulties in measuring corruption. Using nonparametric methods and new data to reduce sensitivity to these problems, we find no evidence for this hypothesis. Instead, we find some evidence in the opposite direction, that PR leads to less corruption.

The second essay makes a theoretical distinction between voters’ perceptions of the corruption of the political system and of individual politicians. Evidence from original interviews and focus group discussions, as well as public opinion data shows that many Ugandan citizens perceive their political system to be highly corrupt. In particular, they perceive corrupt acts to be widespread, do not expect perpetrators to be punished, and have difficulty distinguishing “honest” candidates. These characteristics cause voters who perceive the system to be highly corrupt to be less likely to punish overtly corrupt individuals by withdrawing electoral support. In some cases, they even prefer clearly corrupt candidates.

The third essay argues that to understand when voters hold politicians accountable for corruption, it is necessary to understand who they perceive to be corrupt. It presents evidence from a survey experiment showing that American voters perceive copartisan politicians to be less corrupt than those from the other political party or without a party label. This pattern is consistent with motivated reasoning in which voters expend extra cognitive resources to process information that contradicts their partisan leanings rather than from the use of party labels as heuristics to avoid cognitive burdens. Furthermore, I show that the ideological orientation of the media source reporting allegations of corruption affects whether they are viewed as credible. Counterstereotypical allegations – i.e., those that come from a media source that is ideologically similar to the politician – are taken more seriously by respondents. In fact, when partisans view counterstereotypical allegations, they exhibit less bias toward copartisans. In sum, this research demonstrates that in-group favoritism poses a challenge to democratic accountability, but that motivated reasoning is bounded by the evidence voters view, and thus that media sources with well-known ideological ori- entations may serve a particularly important role in encouraging democratic accountability among their bases.