Corruption for competence

Desiree Desierto

Economics of Governance, 2023, vol. 24, issue 4, No 1, 399-420

Abstract: Abstract When do citizens tolerate corrupt, but competent, politicians? This paper formally establishes conditions under which citizens trade off corruption for competence. First, the regime has to be sufficiently democratic such that a corrupt politician has to be acceptable to a large enough coalition of citizens in order to stay in power. Second, institutions are such that the politician can more easily obtain rents by taking bribes in exchange for spending revenues on public goods, rather than by stealing the revenues outright: the former case can generate more public goods than the latter. Under these two conditions, competence sustains corruption, and vice-versa.

Keywords: Grand corruption; Rent-seeking; Theft; Bribery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10101-023-00295-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:ecogov:v:24:y:2023:i:4:d:10.1007_s10101-023-00295-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10101/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10101-023-00295-4

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Governance is currently edited by Amihai Glazer and Marko Koethenbuerger

More articles in Economics of Governance from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().