Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Paraguay

Rumilda Cañete, Josepa Miquel-Florensa, Stephane Straub and Karine van Der Straeten ()
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Rumilda Cañete: Independent Researcher
Josepa Miquel-Florensa: TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
Karine van Der Straeten: IAST - Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics - UT Capitole - Université Toulouse Capitole - UT - Université de Toulouse - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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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.

Keywords: Corruption; Electoral systems; Information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03047130v1
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Published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2020, 179, pp.223-239. ⟨10.1016/j.jebo.2020.08.046⟩

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Related works:
Working Paper: Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Paraguay (2022)
Journal Article: Voting corrupt politicians out of office? Evidence from a survey experiment in Paraguay (2020)
Working Paper: Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Paraguay (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03047130

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2020.08.046

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