The Independence of Prosecutors and Government Accountability

Jerg Gutmann and Stefan Voigt

No 8, ILE Working Paper Series from University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics

Abstract: Prosecutors are immensely influential in every judicial system, yet very little is known about the impact of their organization. Here we ask two questions: (1) whether crimes committed by public officials are more likely to be prosecuted when prosecutors are independent, and (2) whether this effect depends on the integrity of the prosecutors themselves. We employ a novel indicator for prosecutorial independence based on data from the World Justice Project to answer these questions. We find that prosecutorial independence favors the prosecution of different types of public officials and this effect is conditional on the level of prosecutorial corruption. For police officers, we find that prosecutorial independence is not decisive, but prosecutorial corruption matters for whether suspected misconduct is likely to be prosecuted.

Keywords: Prosecutorial Independence; Prosecutorial Corruption; Government Accountability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D73 H11 K40 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-law
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: The Independence of Prosecutors and Government Accountability (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ilewps:8

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