Born to Govern or to Extract? Party types across administrative levels in Colombia

Juan Sebastián Lara-Rodríguez

No 6xsk9_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Political parties and corruption research relies predominantly on political spectrum, overlooking the organisational attributes that shape whether parties constrain or facilitate corrupt behaviour. This paper proposes a typological framework that clasïsifies parties by their organisational origins — traditional, personalistic, ethnic, rebelïorigin, and neo-Pentecostal — and examines how these are related to corruption across mayoral, gubernatorial, and presidential administrative levels. Drawing on prosecutorial records from Colombia’s Attorney General covering 2011–2020, I construct a composïite corruption indicator for 1,122 municipalities across three local and two presidential elections. The empirical strategy combines municipality and two-way fixed effects, spaïtial econometric models, and a regression discontinuity design exploiting close elections. The results show that rebel-origin parties and citizen-signature movements consistently reduce corruption, whilst traditional and personalistic types remain statistically indistinïguishable; ethnic parties appear insignificant in the main classification, but the sensitivity analysis reveals that once parapolitically captured parties are reassigned, genuine indigenïous parties significantly reduce rent-seeking. This relationship varies across governmental tiers: party structure binds at the municipal level, church-based accountability operates at the gubernatorial level, and armed-group networks override party type at the presidential level. Voter turnout is positively associated with municipal corruption, consistent with clientelistic mobilisation. These findings demonstrate that how parties are built matters for understanding corruption in multi-party democracies.

Date: 2026-10-14
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://osf.io/download/6acf54027da9716ea4987540/

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:osf:socarx:6xsk9_v1

DOI: 10.31235/osf.io/6xsk9_v1

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by OSF ().