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: 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 traditional, most corrupt parties. We design a survey experiment to test these predictions in Paraguay and nd strong supporting evidence. We do not nd 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: 2022-04-04
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-03629643v1
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Related works:
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)
Working Paper: Voting Corrupt Politicians Out of Office? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Paraguay (2020)
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