Van Der Straeten, Karine, Cañete, Rumilda, Straub, Stéphane and Miquel-Florensa, Josepa (2020) Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Paraguay. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 179. pp. 223-239.

This is the latest version of this item.

Full text not available from this repository.
Identification Number : 10.1016/j.jebo.2020.08.046

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.

Item Type: Article
Language: English
Date: November 2020
Refereed: Yes
Uncontrolled Keywords: Corruption, Electoral systems, Information
Subjects: B- ECONOMIE ET FINANCE
Divisions: TSE-R (Toulouse)
Site: UT1
Date Deposited: 08 Dec 2020 16:11
Last Modified: 08 Jun 2023 08:27
OAI Identifier: oai:tse-fr.eu:124635
URI: https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/41757

Available Versions of this Item

View Item