Reelection Incentives and Corruption: Revisiting the Evidence with LLM-Classified Audit Reports

Ricardo Dahis, Martin Mattsson () and Nathalia Sales ()
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Martin Mattsson: Department of Economics, National University of Singapore
Nathalia Sales: Department of Economics, PUC-Rio

No 2025-08, Monash Economics Working Papers from Monash University, Department of Economics

Abstract: We revisit the literature about the impact of reelection incentives on corruption with an extended dataset of corruption audit reports classified with Large Language Model (LLM). We first show that correlations between the LLM-generated corruption measures and manually coded assessments are comparable to correlations among the manual datasets themselves. Our results support previous findings in the literature, although the result is only statistically significant for one out of three measures of corruption. We document significant heterogeneity in the effect over time and investigate several explanations for these empirical patterns, including changing composition of politicians and increasing probability of legal penalties.

Keywords: reelection incentives; corruption; LLM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 K42 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law and nep-sea
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