TY - JOUR
T1 - Elections and Corruption
T2 - Incentives to Steal or Incentives to Invest?
AU - Fazekas, M.
AU - Hellmann, Olli
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
PY - 2023/11/3
Y1 - 2023/11/3
N2 - By now, most political systems around the world hold regular multiparty elections of different quality and type. However, we know relatively little about the effect of elections on corruption, especially in high-discretion, public procurement contracts implementing development aid. To address this gap in the literature, we employ unmatched comparisons and matching estimators to analyze a global government contracting dataset that provides an objective proxy for corruption: the incidence of single bidding in competitive markets. We find that, all things being equal, corruption risks increase in the immediate pre-election period: single bidding is higher by 1.3–6.1% points. We demonstrate that the corruption-enhancing effect of elections is stronger under conditions of (i) high electoral competitiveness, (ii) medium-level party institutionalization, and (iii) “localized collective goods” clientelism.
AB - By now, most political systems around the world hold regular multiparty elections of different quality and type. However, we know relatively little about the effect of elections on corruption, especially in high-discretion, public procurement contracts implementing development aid. To address this gap in the literature, we employ unmatched comparisons and matching estimators to analyze a global government contracting dataset that provides an objective proxy for corruption: the incidence of single bidding in competitive markets. We find that, all things being equal, corruption risks increase in the immediate pre-election period: single bidding is higher by 1.3–6.1% points. We demonstrate that the corruption-enhancing effect of elections is stronger under conditions of (i) high electoral competitiveness, (ii) medium-level party institutionalization, and (iii) “localized collective goods” clientelism.
KW - Corruption
KW - Elections
KW - Public procurement
KW - World Bank
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85175630630&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s12116-023-09412-0
DO - 10.1007/s12116-023-09412-0
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85175630630
SN - 0039-3606
JO - Studies in Comparative International Development
JF - Studies in Comparative International Development
ER -