Perceiving bad apples versus rotten trees: Evidence from the exposure of politician misbehavior in Colombia

Lucía Mendoza Mora ()

No 20515, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of disclosing information about politician misbehavior on trust in public institutions. I use news bulletins from the main anti-corruption agency in Colombia announcing disciplinary prosecutions against municipal mayors. I exploit the timing of the bulletin's publication as a source of variation on the information about the mayor's misbehavior. Using a difference-in-difference framework, I find that news of the prosecution led to increased trust in judicial institutions. However, the effects on confidence in the political system depend on whether citizens perceive the prosecuted mayor as an individual transgressor or as representative of political institutions that are persistently led by questionable individuals. In the former case, the bulletin's publication increased support for the political system. In the latter, it diminished trust in the elections, political parties and Congress. These findings highlight the sophistication of citizens' judgements in response to information on institutional performance.

Keywords: Trust; Public Institutions; Corruption (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 D80 H11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59
Date: 2022-10-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/62923/dcede2022-41.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:020515

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Universidad De Los Andes-Cede ().