@article{publications41757,
          volume = {vol. 179},
           month = {November},
          author = {Karine Van Der Straeten and Rumilda Ca{\~n}ete and St{\'e}phane Straub and Josepa Miquel-Florensa},
           title = {Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Paraguay},
       publisher = {Elsevier},
         journal = {Journal of Economic Behavior \& Organization},
           pages = {223--239},
            year = {2020},
        keywords = {Corruption, Electoral systems, Information},
             url = {https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/41757/},
        abstract = {This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that giving voters more power ? both formally through the use of more ?open? electoral systems and informally through easier access to information on politicians? wrongdoings ? will necessarily result in them voting corrupt politicians out of office. Focusing on a comparison between closed-list and open-list proportional representation systems, we theoretically show that opening the lists is likely to generate a large shift of vote shares in favor of the incumbent parties, which in many countries happen to be the most corrupt. We design a survey experiment to test these predictions in Paraguay and find strong supporting evidence. We do not find in our context that the lack of information is a major obstacle preventing voters from voting out corrupt politicians; if anything, under the more open system, supporters of the incumbent party tend to cast more votes for politicians with a recent history of corruption.}
}