%A Karine Van Der Straeten
%A Rumilda Cañete
%A Stéphane Straub
%A Josepa Miquel-Florensa
%J Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization
%T Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Paraguay
%X 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.
%K Corruption
%K Electoral systems
%K Information
%P 223-239
%V vol. 179
%D 2020
%R 10.1016/j.jebo.2020.08.046
%I Elsevier
%L publications41757