Ideology and Corruption

Paula López-Villalba () and Christian Ruzzier
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Paula López-Villalba: University of Michigan

No 178, Working Papers from Universidad de San Andres, Departamento de Economia

Abstract: The most corrupt countries are developing or transition countries, have low income levels, and are closed economies. More interesting, corruption is significantly positively correlated with left-wing governments in a simple cross section of countries – conditional on GDP per capita, income inequality, dominant religion, a recent history of war, and a history of communist rule. Correlation is not causality, however. In this paper, we analyze the direct relevance of government ideology for the extent of corruption, which is a question that has received little attention in the literature so far. Exploiting close electoral races across the world in the post-WWII period in a regression discontinuity design, we compare the levels of corruption in countries where the left wins and loses elections by a small margin, and find that electing a left-wing government has a significant and positive effect on corruption. We also link our results to extended government intervention in the economy and lower-quality bureaucracies under the left.

Keywords: corruption; ideology; partisan effects; close elections. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D73 D78 H11 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58 pages
Date: 2026-02, Revised 2026-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac and nep-pol
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https://repec.udesa.edu.ar/pub/econ/doc178.pdf First version, February 2026 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sad:wpaper:178

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