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When Do Voters Sanction Corrupt Politicians?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2020

Marko Klašnja ,
Noam Lupu Open the ORCID record for Noam Lupu [Opens in a new window]  and
Joshua A. Tucker
Marko Klašnja
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington, DC20057, USA
Noam Lupu*
Affiliation:
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN37235, USA
Joshua A. Tucker
Affiliation:
New York University, New York, NY10012, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

A growing body of research explores the factors that affect when corrupt politicians are held accountable by voters. Most studies, however, focus on one or few factors in isolation, leaving incomplete our understanding of whether they condition each other. To address this, we embedded rich conjoint candidate choice experiments into surveys in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. We test the importance of two contextual factors thought to mitigate voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians: how widespread corruption is and whether it brings side benefits. Like other scholars, we find that corruption decreases candidate support substantially. But, we also find that information that corruption is widespread does not lessen the sanction applied against corruption, whereas information about the side benefits from corruption does, and does so to a similar degree as the mitigating role of permissible attitudes toward bribery. Moreover, those who stand to gain from these side benefits are less likely to sanction corruption.

Keywords

corruptionvotingsurvey experimentconjointArgentinaChileUruguay
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 2021 , pp. 161 - 171
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Fernanda Boidi and the LAPOP Lab for feedback on our survey experiments. We also thank Catherine De Vries and Miriam Golden for their helpful comments. We presented an earlier version of the paper at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the European Political Science Association. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/N0ZRDZ. The authors have no conflicts of interest. NL and MK conducted the statistical analyses. MK wrote the first draft of the paper. All the authors contributed to the research design of the experiments and the paper, as well as revising and editing the manuscript.

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