Political Competition, Ideology and Corruption

Aristotelis Boukouras and Kostas Koufopoulos
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Aristotelis Boukouras: Georg-August-University Göttingen
Kostas Koufopoulos: University of Warwick

No 58, Courant Research Centre: Poverty, Equity and Growth - Discussion Papers from Courant Research Centre PEG

Abstract: This paper presents a model of political competition, where voter decisions are affected by their ideological adherence to political parties. We derive a number of interesting results: First, we show that an equilibrium exists even though voting is fully deterministic. Second, although politicians, because of deterministic voting, can win an election with certainty by making concessions to voters, they choose to win the election only with some probability in order to maximize their expected rents. Third, if the distribution of ideology is asymmetric, then political parties follow different platforms in equilibrium. Finally, our model generates two novel empirical predicitions, which, to the best of our knowledge, have not been tested yet: i) the higher the ideological adherence to a political party the more inefficient policies this party will follow, ii) the higher the number of extra votes required for election victory (the super-majority requirement) the higher the degree of corruption.

Keywords: corruption; political instability; voting behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G21 G28 H32 P16 P43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-cwa and nep-pol
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:got:gotcrc:058

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