The Usefulness of Corruptible Elections

Loren Brandt () and Matthew Turner ()

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: The belief that elections reduce rent seeking by government officials is widely held, likewise the belief that rent seeking decreases as elections are less subject to corruption. In this paper we develop and test a model in which these beliefs are carefully examined. Our model indicates that, while elections may provide a disincentive for rent seeking, this disincentive (1) need not actually materialise, and (2), is not necessarily correlated with the integrity of the electoral protocol. We next consider the ability of village-level elections in rural China to reduce rent seeking, and the extent to which this ability varies as the elections are more or less corruptible. We find that in practice, even elections that appear quite corruptible provide a strong disincentive to rent seeking. Moreover, our results indicate which types of electoral reform lead to more effective popular oversight of leaders, and which do not.

Keywords: Elections; Property rights; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H0 H7 D7 Q0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-law, nep-pbe and nep-pol
Date: Written 2003-07-11
View list of references

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: The Usefulness of Corruptible Elections (2003)
Working Paper: The Usefulness of Corruptible Elections (2006)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics
Address: 150 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario
Series data maintained by RePEc Maintainer ().