Electoral Rules and Corruption

By Torsten Persson, Guido Tabellini, Francesco Trebbi. Social Science Research Network, 2003

866 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? Recent theoretical work suggests a positive answer. But little is known about the data. We try to address this lacuna by relating corruption to different features of the electoral system in a sample of about eighty democracies in the 1990s. We exploit the cross-country variation in the data, as well as the time variation arising from recent episodes of electoral reform. The evidence is consistent with the theoretical priors. Larger voting districts— and thus lower barriers to entry— are associated with less corruption, whereas larger shares of candidates elected from party lists— and thus less individual accountability— are associated with more corruption. Individual accountability appears to be most strongly tied to personal ballots in plurality-rule elections, even though open party lists also seem to have some effect. Because different aspects roughly offset each other, a switch from strictly proportional to strictly majoritarian elections only has a small negative effect on corruption. (JEL: E62, H3)

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22c3fa615c2654f67aa0aaf4fab8f1f348e194d3

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Citations in the corpus

Using Micro-Surveys to Measure and Explain Corruption (2006, background): “Recent contributions on the determinants of corruption include Ades and di Tella (1997, 1999), Persson, Tabellini, and Trebbi (2003), Svensson (2000a), and Treisman (2000).”
Corruption and Energy Efficiency in OECD Countries: Theory and Evidence (2004, background): “21 [TABLE 1 HERE] ) is however a good and widely used proxy for corruptibility (corruption) (see, for example, Persson et al. (2000)).”
Electoral Rules and Government Spending in Parliamentary Democracies (2007, background): “Persson et al. (2003) examine a more general case where parties have a skewed distribution of their voters across districts.”
Political rents in a non-corrupt democracy (2009, neutral): “Persson et al (2003) speci cally investigate how the electoral system a¤ects corruption.”
Instability and the Incentives for Corruption (2009, positive): “…(1997), Lambsdorff (1999), and Svensson (2005). various systematic determinants of corruption, including ethnolinguistic fractionalization (Mauro, 1995), the presence of economic rents (Ades and Di Tella, 1999), the level of democracy (Treisman, 2000), and electoral rules (Persson et al., 2003).”
Fiscal decentralization and public sector efficiency: evidence from OECD countries (2013, background): “PSE is expected to be higher in countries that use the majoritarian system, as the electoral outcome is generally more sensitive to the incumbent’s performance in majoritarian-type elections (Persson and Tabellini, 2003; Persson et al., 2003).”
Social Capital and Political Accountability (2010, neutral): “Persson, Tabellini, and Trebbi (2003) in cross-country data and Gagliarducci, Nannicini, and Naticchioni (2008) in the data set of Italian politicians we also use show that this is confirmed by the empirical evidence.”
THE DETERMINANTS OF CORRUPTION A Literature Survey and New Evidence (2006, background): “…(2001) export Tavares (2003), Bonaglia et al. (2001), Frechette (2001) Trade Gurgur-Shah (2005), opennes Brunetti-Weder (2003), Knack-Azfar (2003), Persson et al. (2003), Fisman-Gatti (2002), Bonaglia et al. (2001), Frechette (2001), Wei (2000), Ades-Di Tella (1999), Laffont and N’Guessan (1999),…”
Corruption, growth, and governance: Private vs. state-owned firms in Vietnam (2012, neutral): “: +31 10 408 9017. n), madijk@rsm.nl (M.A. van n (1997), Jain (2001), and Aidt ella (1999), Li et al. (2000), (2003), Persson et al. (2003), 07). inflation and economic development and country-level institutions, which have been examined in cross-country studies, cannot explain the substantial…”