Daniel Gingerich will be speaking at the Political Economy seminar next Tues on this paper. Here’s the abstract:

What is the relationship between electoral rules and the level of political corruption found in a polity? A rich body of theory in comparative politics suggests that electoral systems which encourage intraparty competition and candidate-centric elections tend to produce costly campaigns and generate high demand among politicians for electoral resources. For this reason, such electoral systems are widely thought to be responsible for high levels of corruption related to the financing of politics. Yet the Latin American experience makes evident that political corruption can also flourish under electoral systems which proscribe intraparty competition, in some cases reaching levels which far surpass those of their candidate-centric counterparts.

How can we account for this puzzling outcome? This paper presents a novel account of the relationship between ballot structure (i.e., the manner in which citizens cast their votes) and corruption related to the financing of politics. It seeks to explain why the received academic wisdom tying candidate-centric electoral systems to political corruption is as compelling as it is, but also shows how an incomplete picture of the causal pathways linking ballot structure to corruption has led the predictions generated by this paradigm to miss their mark. The central argument is that the effect of ballot structure can be decomposed into two components: a demand side component and a supply side component. Although much work has concentrated on the first casual pathway, the second, which focuses on how the resources from corruption are actually generated, has largely been ignored. This paper elaborates the theoretical underpinnings of the supply side linkage using a formal model of party-directed corruption in the bureaucracy. Observable implications of the supply side linkage are examined using data from a large scale public employees survey conducted by the author in Bolivia, Brazil and Chile.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to make the talk. I don’t have any time to read it in detail, but I will say that it looks cool (and that the tables should be graphs, especially Table 8–that’s an easy one!). Also, I’ve always been a bit skeptical of randomized response surveys–they always seem to me to be a bit of a scam: to the extent that they’re effective, you can in fact draw some inferences about individuals’ true responses. This might be the best way to go here, but it’s always bothered me–it seems like a data collection method that is too clever by half.