“[In Nigeria], political parties budget to bribe security and INEC officials.

This is a very serious

challenge to our democracy.”

The above remark was made by Attahiru Jega, the current chairman of Nigeria’s electoral body,

the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to lament the sorry state of elections in

that country. This revealing statement corroborates the many narratives of fraud and malpractice

in the successive elections held in Nigeria since its return to democracy in 1999. Clearly, a

significant part of the problem with Nigeria’s electoral process, especially in light of Jega’s

statement, has been the prevailing incidence of vote-‐- buying (exchange of cash or gifts for

votes), which has almost become a norm during elections. Indeed, vote-‐-buying in its different

dimensions has been a common and recurring feature in the reports of observers on Nigeria’s

elections. The reports are usually characterized by statements such as: “a politician…was alleged

by voters to have distributed money to people who queued to vote as well as electoral and

security officials at a polling station.” A number of empirical studies have also demonstrated the

prevalence of vote-‐- buying in the Nigerian elections.3 For example, a 2007 survey conducted

by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) and Practical Sampling

International shows “that more than seven out of ten Nigerians believe that vote-‐-buying

happens either ‘all of the time’ or ‘most of the time’ in the country’s elections.”

A close observation of the phenomenon of vote-‐-buying in Nigeria suggests its potential to

enrich the existing literature on vote-buying and electoral fraud. Existing theoretical perspectives

have only produced three dominant arguments to explain the foundations of vote-‐-buying in

elections. First, it is argued that socio-‐-economic factors, especially poverty, unemployment,

and illiteracy, play a major role in promoting the market for votes in democracies.5 Second, it is

argued that the voting methods in a particular electoral system may also guarantee the
predominance of vote-‐-buying during elections.6 The third explanation is predicated upon the

belief that vote-‐-buying is a product of the nature of partisanship and party organization in a

particular state.7 What is however uncommon in the literature is an understanding of the

incidence of vote-‐-buying from the lens of the political economy of a state. It was only in 2011

that a useful study by Pedro Vicente surfaced, which establishes a connection between vote--

‐-buying and an oil-‐-dependent economy with the case of Sao-‐-Tome and Principe.8 This

particular study was a follow-‐-up to his earlier research, which discovered a notorious rise in

corruption following the discovery of oil in that small West African country.9

The present study aims to contribute to the argument on the relationship between oil-‐-

dependent state and vote-‐-buying with the illustration of the Nigerian case study. It is no news

that Nigeria is an oil-‐-rich and oil-‐-dependent state. It is currently the largest oil exporter in

Africa given its production of 2.525 million barrels of crude oil per day, and its contribution of

2.7 percent supply to the world’s oil market.10 Furthermore, oil has been a major source of the

country’s revenue, currently accounting for 70 percent of its total revenues. While vote-‐-buying

has been observed as a common occurrence in oil-‐-dependent Nigeria, it is difficult to find a

systematic study that has demonstrated a possible link between oil wealth and vote-‐-buying in

the country. The oil wealth phenomenon in Nigeria has been more popularly employed as an

analytical framework to explain resource conflict in the Niger Delta region, revenue allocation

politics and conflicts, and corruption and underdevelopment in the country.11

Introduction
When do voters punish corrupt politicians? The question has important implications for institu-

tions intended to keep politicians accountable. Electoral accountability is often perceived to be

an important means of reducing incentives of politicians to engage in corruption. While there is a

vast literature about the consequences of corruption (Johnston, 1986; Mauro, 1995; Olken,

2005), the literature focused on the causes of non-corrupt governments is still nascent. As

Adsera`, Boix and Payne (2003, p. 446) succinctly state: “[i]n contrast to the mounting scholarly

research on the consequences of good governance, our knowledge about what causes

governments to be clean and efficient is still at its infancy.” One precondition for electoral

accountability is sufficient knowledge by the citizenry of politicians’ records. When voters are

informed about accusations of corruption, most assume that voters will punish the corrupt

candidates. This paper shows that information about candidate corruption given to voters can

indeed result in the politician being punished by voters, but that some candidates are more

accountable to voters when it comes to corruption than others. The degree to which voters view

corruption as important to their decision-making can vary substantially and, furthermore, can be

correlated with political cleavages. As a result, we show that the increased transparency can have

divergent partisan consequences, even when two competing candidates are corrupt. Previous

studies that merely treat corruption as a valence issue are likely to overlook this important

dimension of the effects that corruption information can have on the electorate.

We find that when voters view corruption as important, then the increased provision of in-

formation can induce supporters of the corrupt candidate to abstain. Our results establish that

transparency can suppress turnout even in the presence of mandatory voting, demonstrating that

in some cases, voters are willing to bear costs not to vote. Additionally, despite a number of pa-
pers that have shown that corruption is not a salient issue in the consciousness of many voters in

the developing world (Anderson and Tverdova, 2003; Chang and Golden, 2004; Renno´, 2007;

Almeida, 2008), we find, under certain conditions, it still remains an important determinant of

voting behavior.1 While a host of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international organi-

zations, and governments have initiated various efforts to increase transparency and government

accountability in elections, few have analyzed the impact of these initiatives in terms of their ef-

fect on electoral behavior in a manner that allows one to make valid causal inferences. Our study

presents a step toward accomplishing such a goal, shedding light on the conditions under which

corruption may or may not be subject to voter sanction.

In this study, we conduct a field experiment during the 2008 mayoral run-off election in Sa˜o

Paulo, Brazil, the seventh largest city in the world. In our study, to our knowledge the first field

experiment involving elections in Latin America, we exploit the fact that both candidates in the

run-off election had been convicted of corruption and inform selected voters of these convictions

via the distribution of fliers. We randomly assigned whether or not households in the vicinity of

a given polling station receive fliers containing the information. The experimental design allows

us to make inferences with a high degree of internal validity about the effect of information on

voting behavior, and unlike previous studies, we are able to examine the effects not only of the

incumbent, but also of the challenger.

Specifically, we take advantage of a unique set of events that took place during the election

period. The Brazilian Magistrates Association (Associac¸a˜o dos Magistrados Brasileiros, or

AMB) pub- lished a document called the “Dirty List” (Lista Suja), which listed politicians

running in the 2008 elections who had convictions involving impropriety while in government

office. Both candidates

running in the election for mayor of Sa˜o Paulo – Gilberto Kassab of the Democratic Party

(DEM) and Marta Suplicy of the Worker’s Party (PT) – appeared on the AMB’s Dirty List.

During the week prior to the elections, we administered two treatments: the first was a flier

informing voters that Kassab appeared on the Dirty List and gave information about the nature of

his conviction, and the second was a flier that did the same for Suplicy. We then randomly

assigned voting precincts that would receive the Kassab or Suplicy flier, and also had a control

group of precincts that did not receive the flier. In all, households in the vicinity of 100 precincts

received the Kassab flier, another set of households in the vicinity of 100 precincts received the

Suplicy flier, and 200 precincts were in the control group. In the week prior to the election, we

hired a direct marketing firm that distributed a total of 187,177 fliers to individual households.

To measure the effect of the intervention, we examined electoral outcomes.2

Introduction

If voters dislike corruption, why does it exist amongst politicians, even in societies characterized

by strong institutions and high accountability?2 A possible, understudied reason for this

phenomenon is that, sometimes, voters might knowingly vote for corrupt politicians.

Understanding this potential cause of corruption is important since corruption is thought to be a

significant barrier to economic growth and democratization, and these are central concerns for

social scientists (Mauro 1995; Holmberg, Rothstein and Nasiritousi 2009) and policy makers.

Understanding the electoral roots of corruption should also help policy makers design suitable

remedies for the problem.

In this report, we describe our ongoing efforts to answer three important and related questions

about corruption and voting behavior, using data from Afghanistan. First, to what degree do
voters support corrupt politicians? IGC support has enabled us to provide a preliminary answer

to this question, using newly collected observational data. Second, why do voters support corrupt

politicians? A series of IGC-supported qualitative interviews with journalists has helped us shed

light on this question. And third, how, and to what degree, can voters be persuaded to penalize

corrupt politicians? Answers to these questions promise to enhance our theoretical and practical

understanding of voting behavior with regard to corruption, and could also suggest possible

remedies for the phenomenon.

To structure our examination of the circumstances under which voters punish corrupt politicians,

we draw on standard theories of voter behavior and accountability. An extensive literature on

voter behavior argues that voters choose among candidates for political office depending on their

expected utility. In their efforts to maximize their utility, voters trade-off candidates’ positive

characteristics against their negative ones, of which corruption might be one. The second theory

that we draw on comes from a rich literature on accountability, which argues that voters penalize

corruption when they are made aware of it. We put these two literatures together, to argue that

voters penalize corruption when they are made aware of it, provided the benefits of voting for a

corrupt candidate do not outweigh its costs. We seek to understand when this is the case, i.e., the

conditions under which information allows voters to hold politicians to account.

We examine the vote penalty for corruption in Afghanistan for a number of reasons. First,

regular voting (since 2004)3 and corruption coexist in the country. Further, and as we document

in the next section using an IGC-supported data collection effort, there is considerable variation

in corruption in the country. Second, the United Kingdom’s security interests in Afghanistan

make it a particularly important case to study since corruption is thought to be at the root of a

number of problems—from security to development—that plague the region. Our project will
therefore have a particular validity in post-conflict contexts.

The problem

In theory, democracies are organised through a set of rules and institutional mecha- nisms that

limit the spread of corruption to critical levels, among others: universal, free and fair elections;

freedom of expression; political pluralism; electoral competi- tion; alternation in power; a series

of counter-weights and constitutional guarantees; independent media; an impartial

administration; and an informed and demanding citizenry. In practice, despite all these

mechanisms, corruption continues to occur in democracies with devastating consequences for

their stability and legitimacy.

Although good laws and good institutions are quintessential to the fight against corruption [119],

they seem to be insufficient to reverse its resilient effects in a society. Countries have stockpiled

a series of anti-corruption laws and mechanisms,

engaged in several administrative and judicial reforms, and yet, in many instances, the results

promised by their designers have not been yielded. The prevalence of corruption in a given

society not only depends on the quality of its legal and institutional frameworks but also on the

civic culture of its citizens. Fighting corrup- tion is not only about improving good governance’s

hardware (laws, processes and institutions) but also its software (public ethics and expectations),

by ‘transforming political culture in the widest sense’ ([71]: 83).

In democracies, apart from criminal liability, elected politicians are also bound by a concept of

political responsibility, central to the contract of representation between voters and those elected
to represent them. Given the incapacity or proved difficulty of the judiciary to condemn

politicians for serious abuse of office, the possibility to punish corrupt behaviour at the ballot

box becomes the ultimate sanction to make politicians responsible for their misdeeds and to

restore a minimal concept of legality in politics. In principle, democratic elections provide

incentives for integrity by making politicians accountable for their policies as well as their

conduct in office [11, 39, 64, 99, 139]. In practice, however, electoral punishment of political

corrup- tion is hardly a reality in many democracies. It is, therefore, important to understand why

this type of vertical accountability takes place in certain democratic contexts and not in others.

One of the intriguing phenomena in democracy is the fact that politicians involved in, accused of

or condemned for corruption in a court of law get re-elected by their constituents. In some cases,

corruption does not seem to negatively affect the development of political careers. On the

contrary, it may actually help to consolidate them by enabling office holders to extract sufficient

illegal rents to mobilise clientelistic support that helps them to perpetuate in office. If democracy

is based on the belief that the “best” or “most fitted” politicians get elected through a pluralist

competitive process, then it is important to understand what is the impact of corrup- tion in

voters’ preferences, in other words, to what extent voters value ethical standards when assessing

the “qualities” of the candidates and why they prefer to support corrupt candidates.

We have decided to focus on most similar cases to try to understand the dynamics of micro- and

macro-variables affecting voters’ behaviours and predispositions to sanction the corrupt conduct

of their candidates at the ballot box. Southern European democracies offer an interesting ground

to test these explanatory variables, not only because they display common contextual features

(high levels of public debt in percentage of GDP due to both ill-informed as well as clientelistic

and corrupt public spending decisions, mismanagement of public funds and resources,
economically biased political decisions, partitocracy and recurrent political patronage in the

public sector, bureaucracies with poor accountability and transparency, inconsistent penal

frameworks and inefficient judicial institutions, unclear regulations, weak civic action, etc.) but

because corruption has systematically been perceived as more widespread than in its northern

European counterparts. All four countries have seen their position in the Corruption Perceptions

Index decline systematically over the past decade, but whereas the Iberian democracies are still

above the waterline in the EU27 scale, Italy and especially Greece have plunged to

unprecedented low scores. These democracies have been consolidated for more than three

decades (longer in the case of Italy) and yet democratic values have not been harmoniously

diffused to all its

territory or appropriated by citizens. Clientelism and political corruption are ripe, and the

dividing line between public and private is murky. The current conjuncture is particularly

interesting to test hypotheses on the electoral punishment of corruption. Due to the economic

adjustment policies and austerity measures these countries are going through, corruption has

become a highly sensitive issue in the public arena and political debate. The mixture “austerity +

corruption” is highly corrosive to demo- cratic legitimacy: while disillusioned citizens are

frequently engaging in street protest and increasingly displaying anti-party, anti-elite and anti-

system voting preferences; conventional parties are desperately trying to find manageable

government solutions, through grand coalition arrangements and technocratic cabinet formations

that try to keep at bay both extreme-right parties and populist movements riding the

anticorruption ticket.

In this introductory article, we try to develop a multidimensional framework for analysing

electoral punishment of corruption. First, we will look into various studies on electoral
punishment and highlight their advancements and shortcomings. Then, we will propose a more

dynamic account of electoral punishment of corruption that takes into account individual- as well

as macro-level explanations. Finally, we will disaggregate these two analytical dimensions into

various explanatory factors.

Main Findings

We start by examining observational data on voting and corruption cross-nationally and within

Afghanistan. This approach shows that there is almost no corruption penalty cross-

nationally, and a small corruption penalty in Afghanistan. Before we proceed to describe our

results, it is worth noting that this approach does not tell us whether the relationship between

corruption and voter support of politicians is causal (large corruption penalties could cause

corruption, for example, by reducing politicians’ time horizons), however, nor will it explain the

variance in voter support for corrupt politicians. To investigate further whether and why voters

might punish or support corrupt politicians, we propose to use survey experiments, embedded in

a nationally representative survey of Afghanistan’s voting-age population. We describe these

efforts in the concluding section of this report.

Future Research

To further understand whether and the degree to which Afghanistan’s voters punish or reward

corrupt politicians, we intend to employ three types of survey experiments—list experiments,

experimental vignettes, and endorsement experiments—in the future, and subject to receiving
funding. These methods will experimentally determine whether there is a corruption penalty or

benefit, and will do so in a manner that is free of social desirability bias, a problem that forthright

questions about corruption—a taboo subject in Afghanistan, as elsewhere—face.14

Second, to understand why voters support corrupt politicians, we will examine the multivariate

correlates of the corruption penalty using standard regression analysis and the methods proposed

by Imai (2011). We will also substantially improve this analysis by directly manipulating various

“mediating variables”—including hypothetical candidate ethnicity, ability, promises of pork, etc.

—in our experimental vignettes, to see whether they temper or exacerbate effects of corruption.

When drawing up the list of mechanisms we will be testing, we intend to draw on our IGC-

funded interviews of journalists, which—as described previously—suggested several reasons

why voters tolerate corruption. This approach will allow us to bring the same experimental vigor

to our analysis of the corruption penalty’s variation as we will have used to investigate the

existence of the corruption penalty.

Lastly, we also will employ our experimental vignettes to examine the efficacy of secular or

religious reminders of corruption’s negative effects. Such reminders could form the basis of

voter education campaigns, and would provide us with evidence with which to craft such

campaigns.

Our approach will allow us to examine the degree to which voters support or punish corrupt

politicians, the reasons for the same, and will speak to the possible efficacy of voter education

campaigns. This will substantially deepen our understanding of the complex trade-offs that

voters face, and will also help us understand when transparency campaigns are likely to remedy

political corruption. This will help us generate practical solutions for electoral support for corrupt

politicians. Our use of various experimental methods in combination with one another is unique,
and will serve to increase our confidence in the results.

Elections Under Civilian Government.

Elections conducted under civil government were transiting elections meant to re-elect where the

incumbent is contesting or elect a new set of leadership. The elections under this were those

conducted in 1964, 1983, 2003, 2007 and 2011. Unlike the earlier set of elections, these were far

from being free and fair. They were beset by manipulation, violence and litigation.

Prior to the elections of 1964/5, Nigeria became a federation of four regions following the

creation of Mid-Western Region and Nigeria became a Republic in 1963. The unholy alliance of

NPC/NCNC could not be sustained. Action Group was faced with internal crises that threatened

the survival of the party, while NPC that controlled the government was in a stronger position for

the elections. This resulted into re-alignment among the major political parties, and the minority

parties struggle for recognition. From the factioned A.G, Nigeria National Democratic Party

(NNDP) emerged.

The entire election process was characterized by human rights abuse, assault, intimidation and

subversion of procedures in favour of the ruling party or leading party at the regions.78 Voting

patterns reflected official position of regionalism and ethnicity.

1983 election was conducted under a presidential constitution that allowed for direct election of

president and governors. Like in the previous elections political parties could not maintain united

front hence intra- party crises, defections and eclipse of opposition even within a political party.

For instance Arthur Nzeribe cross-carpeted from Nigeria People’s Party (NPP) to National Party

of Nigeria (NPN) and Deputy Governors of Oyo and Ondo defected from Unity Party of Nigeria
(UPN) to NPN.79 Like in 1964, the ruling party using its position extended its lead including the

capturing of Ondo state. The fraudulent abuse of electoral procedures and outcry that followed

the election led to the premature termination of the second phase of the Second Republic.

After about two decades, Nigerians in 2003 came into terms with another transition elections

following return to democracy in 1999. In preparation for the election number of political parties

increased from three to thirty. This reduced their competitiveness and opposition to the ruling

party, People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Internal crises and defection from one party to another

became a major feature of all parties in preparatory to elections. The administration of election

procedure by Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) suggests that the ruling party

was more favored than other political parties. Similarly, PDP using its federal controlled

government manipulated all necessary agencies and resources to its favour. Thus, at the end of

the election the result was the extension of PDP conquering posture including world record of

100% voters’ turn out in election in some states. Thus Awoniyi commented that;

The 2003 elections is the worst held in the nation’s history, the rigging that characterized the

election was global, total and brazen that not a little element of good can be expected out of it.80

The 2007 general elections was another critical election in the Fourth Republic. It was critical

firstly, because the attempted tenure elongation of the then incumbent President, Olusegun

Obasanjo was thwarted. Secondly, the primary election of the ruling party was marred with

irregularities including suspension of the then incumbent vice president, Atiku Abubakar and

subsequently screened out from the contest.

Thirdly, the ruling party in alliance with INEC registered more political parties to weaken the

opposition. Lastly, President Olusegun Obasano declared 2007 elections as a matter of “do or die

affair” and INEC show of unpreparedness and support for the ruling party.
The election was held in April but voters’ turnout was not better than that of 2003 election. The

ruling party, PDP continued with her unprecedented winning magic. The questionable success

was attained through rigging, ballot box stuffing, falsification of results, intimidation of

opposition and voters, direct assault on people and declaration of results where election did not

take place. The outcome of the election was not that supprising considering Obasanjo’s

submission that “this election is a do or die affairs for PDP. We have a reform programme which

we have started, we want those who we will handover to, to continue the reforms….81

The 2011 transitional election was dicier than the 2007 elections. This was based on the issue of

zoning formula and the interest of President Goodluck Jonathan to contest. Earlier, PDP had

zone the presidency to alternate between the north and the south. The arrangement was thwarted

in its second phase following the death of Alhaji Umar Musa Yar’dua and accession of his vice,

Goodluck Jonathan. As against the zoning formula and expectation, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan was

encouraged, coarse and anointed by all sort of groups including expired politicians and political

prostitutes. This set the stage for election as it became a major contest between PDP and the

newly registered Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) of General Muhammadu Buhari.

The election was held in April, 2011. The outcome was not that different from the previous ones.

The election was marred with irregularities, fraudulent practices, flagrant use of money, vote

buying and godfathering. These acts were carried out by godfathers, hired thugs, politicians,

security

agencies, civil servants including INEC ad hoc and career staff. John Campbell said of 2011

presidential elections:

There appears to have been substantial election rigging, not so much at polling stations where

international observers were often present but at the collation centre where monitors were
usually absent…In twelve state one-third of the total possible voter turnout was suspiciously

high. The national voter turnout average was 53percent. In the twelve identified states, the turn

out range from 62percent to 84 percent.82

Implications of High Reelection Rates of Corrupt Incumbent

In sum, our empirical analysis finds supportive evidence for our insider-outsider theory. With

respect to perceptions of corruption, the results corroborate our expectations that identity insiders

were more likely to turn a blind eye to corruption. This was not the case, however, for patronage

insiders whose perceptions of corruption were higher than citizens outside of the patronage

network. Meanwhile, patronage-insiders are significantly more forgiving of corruption

committed by their patrons.

Most importantly, these findings provide us with the theoretical leverage to disentangle an

interesting paradox  the coexistence of public disdain for corruption and popular corrupt

politicians  in the corruption literature (Kurer 2001). Indeed, one peculiar and normatively

disturbing phenomenon is that corrupt incumbents actually enjoy relatively high reelection rates,

even in the context of advanced democracies. Perhaps one of the most illustrative examples of

this paradox is Tanaka Kakuei. The then Japanese prime minister, despite being tried in court for

bribery during the infamous Lockheed sandal, collected his career high votes from his

constituency and was re-elected to the Diet for fifteen consecutive times after the 1983 “Tanaka
Verdict Election” (Johnson 1986). Mr. Tanaka is well accompanied by Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi,

who, despite his alleged links to the Mafia and being put on trial multiple times for a variety of

corruption and malfeasance charges, has served as prime minister in Italy three times since the

mid-1990s. Other members in this corruption elite squad include Edwin Edwards in the U.S., and

Thaksin in Thailand, just to name a few.

These corrupt political figures do not appear to be exceptions. In a systematic study, Reed (2005)

finds that legislators in Japan who are convicted of corruption charges actually enjoy increases in

their vote shares.

Moreover, sixty-two percent of Japanese legislators convicted of corruption between 1947 and

1993 were subsequently reelected. Similarly, Peters and Welch (1980) find that in the U.S.

House of Representatives elections, corruption charges only reduce candidates’ vote share by 6

to 11 percent and are inadequate for deterring corrupt candidates from electoral victories. In a

subsequent analysis, Welch and Hibbing (1997) show that from 1982 to 1990, charges of

corruption affected U.S. House reelection probabilities more severely, but again those charged

were more likely than not to be reelected. Finally, in a recent study, Chang et al. (2007) show

that in post-war Italy, judicial investigation of political malfeasance, while slightly reducing the

probability of achieving reelection, did not effectively discourage deputies from standing for

reelection at all. Importantly, they find that judicial inquiry damages the electoral fortunes of

legislators in only the Eleventh legislature, while in the first ten legislatures, Italian voters failed

to penalize legislators even in light of evidence of political corruption. In addition, parallel to

Welsh and Hibbing’s findings, Chang et al. show that when a legislator is under judicial

investigation for political malfeasance, his reelection probability is still over fifty percent.15
The high reelection rates of corrupt incumbents in these highly developed democratic countries

directly challenge the principles of democracy. After all, the most compelling justification for

democracy is that

public officials can be held accountable for their misbehaviors. Needless to say, democratic

ideals and practices can be severely undermined when politicians remain untouchable and are

free from electoral retribution even after betraying the public’s trust by extracting excessive

rents. Therefore, the puzzle of why voters do not bother to throw the rascals out has attracted

growing attention.

In a nutshell, the conventional wisdom attributes the electoral success of corrupt politicians to

three informational dilemmas faced by the electorate: the information deficiency, the

coordination problem induced by information asymmetry, and ignorance. In the first account,

voters are argued to support corrupt politicians simply because they are poorly informed and

hence unable to accurately observe politicians’ true type. For instance, in their study of Brazil’s

municipal elections, Ferraz and Finan (2008) initially find that incumbent mayors subject to anti-

corruption audit before elections did not suffer from significant electoral penalty. But once they

account for the level of corruption that was revealed in the audit, they find that corruption audit

strongly reduces the incumbent’s likelihood of reelection. Moreover, they show that the effect of

information disclosure on the incumbent’s reelection odds is even more pronounced in

municipalities with local radio stations.

In the second perspective, voters’ support of corrupt politicians is a strategic response to a

collective action dilemma. The intuition is that due to the uncertainty of other voters’ voting

intention, a rational voter reluctantly supports the corrupt politician out of fear that she might be

defecting alone, and that once unsuccessful, the reigning corrupt incumbent will retaliate by

cutting off particularistic benefits (Kurer 2001). Finally, some scholars suggest that the key to

solving this paradox lies in a simple answer: voters’ ignorance. Kurer, for instance, suggests that

“…ignorance about the effects of corruption, about the alternatives available, and about the

intentions of those standing for election are possible reasons for voters to support corrupt

politics” (2001: 79). Olken (2009) explicitly examines the extent of information contained in

Indonesian villagers’ beliefs about the likelihood of corruption in their villages, and he finds that

while villagers’ beliefs do contain information about corruption, the magnitude of their

information, however, is very small.

In short, these informational approaches assume that voters genuinely dislike corruption, and that

they support corrupt politicians either because they are kept in the dark without information or

they are trapped in sub-optimal equilibrium due to the difficulty of coordination. Importantly, the

conventional wisdom posits that once empowered with the necessary information, voters will be

able to either see the light or solve the coordination problem, and consequently punish corrupt

politicians. However, this informational account is not as theoretically persuasive as it is

normatively appealing. In particular, this informational thesis is incapable of explaining the

puzzle of high reelection rates of corrupt incumbents in the context of advanced democracy

where there is no shortage of information supply. For instance, in a country like Japan where the

freedom of press is sound and citizens are highly educated, it is hard to imagine that voters were

brutally denied information access to Mr. Tanaka’s involvement in corruption scandals or simply
were too ignorant to understand it. It is also more reasonable to assume that when an incumbent

is implicated in corruption scandals in advanced democracies the opposition party would

capitalize on the opportunity and provide a focal point to help solve the coordination problem for

voters during electoral campaigns.

The theoretical deficiency of the informational thesis leads to a new wave of research. In this

renewed scholarly attempt, supporting corrupt government can be regarded as a rational decision

chosen by well- informed voters. Manzetti and Wilson (2007) argue that corrupt politicians in

weakly institutionalized systems are able to remain electorally viable because of their capacity to

exploit government resources for patrimonial purposes. In other words, when the government is

weakly institutionalized and unable to deliver public goods, voters will support corrupt

politicians in exchange for private benefits, since they perceive clientelism as the most effective

mechanism of distributing state resources. Other scholars argue that corruption can arise even in

a well-functioning democracy. In a recent study, Pani (2009) shows that corruption not only

distorts the allocation of state resources between public and private spending, but also diverts the

policy spending preferences of politicians away from voters. Under such circumstances,

corruption will result in the reduction of public spending and taxes.16 Importantly, because

corruption involves redistributional consequences, Pani shows that certain citizens can benefit

indirectly from corruption and have an incentive to support a corrupt political system.

This paper builds upon the extant literature and shows how our insider-outsider framework bears

greatly on elucidating the puzzle of unpopular yet successful corrupt politicians. We concur that

the conventional information thesis might have only limited explanatory power. Specifically, we
argue that being an identity insider, be it based on partisan or ethnic affiliation, inevitably clouds

one’s judgment of the incumbent regardless of relevant information that might be abundantly

available. As a result, the in-group bias can substantially attenuate the negative corruption-vote

link that is initially established by most citizens. Our insider-outsider framework, to a certain

extent, also extends the rational corruption perspective and emphasizes the importance of

instrumentality in voters’ electoral behavior. We argue that corrupt incumbents can maintain

substantial electoral advantages even when corrupt activities are patently disliked by the public.

Importantly, we suggest that insiders  particularly, the beneficiaries of patronage spoils  may

be willing to cut corrupt politicians some slack as long as they bring home the bacon. In sum,

one important implication derived from our insider-outsider framework is that insiders’ support

of the incumbent, when compared to outsiders, is less affected by corruption. Note that we do not

argue that insiders will reward corruption, instead, our hypothesis is that corruption matters less

for insiders’ support of the incumbent.

While this paper empirically addresses a similar question on why voters support corrupt

politicians, it takes a unique approach that differs from that of Kurer (2001) and Manzetti and

Wilson (2007). In particular, unlike Kurer (2001) who usefully surveys the literature and

provides a list of potential explanations, this paper goes another step further by attempting to

disentangle this daunting puzzle empirically. Although Manzetti and Wilson (2007) also attempt

this goal, their analysis is unfortunately restricted by data constraints. As they acknowledge

themselves, the difficulty in testing their argument is that “…there are simply no data to directly

measure, in any cross-national fashion, the level of patronage provided by politicians (956).” As

a second-best solution, they execute a country-level analysis with the satisfaction of government
as the dependent variable and they relate it to an indicator of democratic institutional strength, an

indicator of citizens’ perceived levels of corruption, and the interaction term between the above

two. By contrast, this paper chooses an alternative research design that can arguably offer better

empirical leverage to solve this puzzle. Specifically, we employ an individual level analysis and

examine whether a voter’s voting intention is affected by her insider-outsider status and her

personal experience with corruption. Through this individual level research framework, we are

at a better vantage point to directly examine the causal dynamics of why voters support corrupt

politicians. Without having to draw inferences about the electoral behaviors of individual voters

on the basis of aggregate data, we can also avoid the dangers of ecological fallacy.

To explicitly test for this hypothesis, we turn to AB data and examine information on

respondents’ voting record. The dependent variable is whether a respondent intends to vote for

the incumbent if a presidential election were held tomorrow, and it takes the value of one if she

does. The key independent variable is respondents’ experience with corruption. Obviously, the

coefficient is expected to be negative. More importantly, to examine whether the insider-outsider

status lessens the corruption-vote link, we construct a composite index for insider status.

Specifically, to ensure that our newly constructed variable efficiently and equitably captures both

the instrumentality and identity components of the insider-outsider distinction, we create a binary

variable that takes the value of one if a respondent is both a patronage insider and a partisan or

ethnic insider. Then we create an interaction term between our measure of corruption experience

and the composite insider variable. If our expectation that corruption has less of a negative

impact on insider’s support for the incumbent is correct, the coefficient of the interaction term

should be positive.
The results show just that. Figure 1 further illustrates graphically that insiders are less inclined to

punish corrupt incumbents for their corrupt acts at the polls. As we can see, the downward slope

for outsiders suggests that corruption experience indeed reduces outsiders’ electoral support for

the incumbent. However, the downward slope for insiders is actually flat (more precisely,

upward but insignificant). In other words, corruption experience matters less electorally for

insiders as opposed to outsiders. We also find that insiders, due to either affective identity or

material considerations, are much more supportive of the incumbent at the polls. In sum, these

findings provide compelling rationale for the paradox of corrupt politicians who enjoy repeated

electoral success in countries that citizens have high perceptions of political corruption. Notably,

our results challenge the exclusivity of informational theories of corruption that predicate

citizens’ ability to sanction corrupt politicians upon the availability of information on corruption.

Instead, we arrive at a more nuanced explanation for the paradox, on the basis that even when

citizens are sufficiently informed of the incidence of corruption, their likelihood to use this

information depends critically on the existence of an affiliation with the incumbent; be it of an

instrumental or an affective nature. Furthermore, the results reinforce the analytical disparity

between perceptions and tolerance by demonstrating that citizens who benefit from corruption

might choose to turn a blind eye to it, even when information about corruption is abundantly

available.
Corruption Information and Voting Behavior

An important precondition for electoral accountability is whether or not voters have access to in-

formation about corrupt behavior of public officials, which may prompt them to vote against

such candidates on election day. A theoretical literature focused on the effects of information on

voting behavior concludes that under certain conditions, information improves accountability to

mass publics (Alvarez, 1998; Lupia and McCubbins, 1998; Przeworski, Stokes and Manin, 1999;

Besley and Burgess, 2002). However, the empirical literature is still relatively scant on

understanding the conditions under which information about corruption results in electoral

accountability.3 Making valid causal inferences about information effects is difficult, in large

part because availability of information about the corruption of politicians is confounded by

factors such as socioeconomic status and partisanship. A number of studies with non-

experimental data that attempt to exam- ine the effects of corruption charges on electoral

performance find only modest effects (Peters and Welch, 1980; McCann and Dominguez,

1998).4 In a study of municipal governments in Brazil, Ferraz and Finan (2008), exploiting

randomized corruption audits, find relatively large effects that ultimately decrease the probability

of incumbent politicians being reelected. Their important work, which examines the effects

municipal-level corruption audits, however, does not include candidate-specific treatments, and

their intervention also only involves incumbent politicians.

Field experiments that examine the effects of corruption on voting behavior have only recently

emerged in the literature. To the best of our knowledge, our experiment conducted in October

2008; Banerjee, Green, Green and Pande (2010)’s and Banerjee, Kumar, Pande and Su (2010)’s
studies in India, conducted in March-April 2007 and December 2008, respectively; and Chong et

al. (2011)’s work, conducted in Mexico in June and October 2009, are among the first field ex-

periments that attempt to randomize informing voters about politicians’ performance in order to

examine the effects on voting behavior. Focusing on the consequences of transparency for

incumbent electoral performance, these other studies have generally found that revelations about

corruption have negligible effects on incumbent vote share relative to challengers’ vote share.

The effects on turnout have been more mixed. The Banerjee, Kumar, Pande and Su (2010) study

found that distribution of information about the criminal records of New Delhi politicians

increased turnout by about 3.6 percentage points. Chong et al. (2011), on the other hand, found a

negative effect of 4 percentage points when voters are given information about corruption from

govern- ment corruption audits in municipalities with highly corrupt incumbents.

Revealing the corruption record of a candidate could be loosely viewed as a negative attack, even

if it does not come from the opposing campaign. From this perspective, a relevant body of work

is the negative campaign advertising literature, which focuses overwhelmingly on the US

context. This largely observational empirical literature has been inconclusive on the conse-

quences of negative attack ads for candidate electoral performance (Lau, Sigelman and Rovner,

2007), though no studies have focused on advertisements that emphasize corruption. With re-

spect to political participation, Ansolabehere and Iyengar (1995), initially relying on laboratory

experiments, argued that negative advertising demobilizes the electorate. One of the mechanisms

they cite is particularly relevant: negative campaigns could lower the probability of voting for the

target of the attacks without simultaneously increasing the probability of voting for the attack-

ing candidate, prompting voters to simply abstain. Thus, while not necessarily provoking vote

switching, negative campaign advertising could still punish targeted candidates via decreased
turnout of their supporters. The observational empirical evidence for this contention, however,

has been mixed (Finkel and Greer, 1998) and has not been tested experimentally by examining

actual turnout behavior.

The contrasting results of these studies motivate important questions about the mechanisms that

explain variation in the voting behavior in these different contexts. Whether or not a voter

actually changes his behavior due to the revelation of information will depend on a number of

factors, but a useful framework for explaining heterogenous effects is the spatial model of elec-

tions (Enelow and Hinich, 1984). The spatial model underscores the important mechanism of

how political factors such as ideological attachments can mediate the effect of corruption

information in the minds of voters. Voters receiving a large amount of subjective utility from a

particular candidate’s victory (”core” supporters) will be unlikely to change their vote or abstain

unless the corruption charge is particularly serious or they place a high degree of importance on

corruption in their vote decision. For more marginal (”swing”) supporters, however, revelation

about corrup- tion is more likely to push voters to either abstain, cast a spoiled ballot, or switch

their vote to the opposing party. When the costs of voting relative to abstaining are high, then

marginal supporters who learn about corruption charges are particularly likely to abstain.

Following a similar logic, learning about corruption could mobilize non-voters to vote for the

opposition, as the difference in utility between abstaining and voting for the opposition would

decrease after the information revelation.

Under this spatial framework, one would expect that the effects of experimental interventions

revealing information about corruption would depend upon the distribution of core and swing

voters in the electorate, as well as the importance supporters and nonvoters place on corruption.5

If the proportion of marginal supporters is large, then one would expect that the revelation of
corruption information would induce abstention (if the costs of voting relative to abstention are

high) or casting spoiled ballots (if the costs of voting relative to abstention are low) or even vote

switching. Casting spoiled ballots is a particularly attractive strategy for disappointed marginal

voters when fines for abstention are substantial in countries with mandatory voting. Similarly, if

voters place a high degree of importance on corruption as an issue, then increased transparency

could induce many core supporters to abstain, spoil their ballot, or change their vote. On the

other hand, if there are many abstainers with sympathies for the opposition party, then increasing

information about corruption could induce these citizens to vote on election day and thus

increase total turnout. The key point is that the aggregate effect of information revelation on

turnout and vote shares will depend on the ex-ante distribution of voters’ preferences, the relative

importance of corruption in voters’ decision-making, and the cost of abstention relative to

voting.

This discussion suggests that the effects of corruption revelation could vary by candidate, even if

both are equally corrupt. If two candidates accused of corruption compete against each other, as

is the case in our study, the impact of information revelation about each candidate’s record could

vary substantially because of any one of these factors. We offer evidence that partisan

attachments can overlap with corruption preferences – a factor the extant literature on corruption

overlooks – are an important mediating variable that shape whether voters punish corrupt

politicians. Of course, while we have emphasized factors linked to the distribution of voter

preferences, other variables such as candidate skill and background could shape voters’ reaction

to increased infor- mation. The existing experimental literature has largely ignored heterogeneity

across different types of candidates, despite the fact it is quite likely that candidates’

susceptibility to increased transparency is likely to depend on the contextual factors we have

highlighted. In the following analysis, we pay particular attention how candidates’ supporters

differ and how these differences affect their response to increased information.

Research Design

Our empirical strategy for understanding how voters respond to information about a candidate’s

record on corruption relies on three distinct components: a survey, a field experiment, and a sur-

vey experiment. Before presenting estimated effects of information revelation on behavior in an

election, we present basic descriptive statistics from a post-election survey that provides useful

context for understanding our findings. Subsequently, we present results from the field experi-

ment and then show survey experimental evidence that supplement our findings from the field

experiment.

We conducted the research in Sa˜o Paulo for a number of reasons. First, it was the

only city in which both candidates in the run-off election appeared on the Dirty List. We

received funding from non-profit U.S. universities, and U.S. law prohibits political advocacy of

candidates in elec- tions by non-profit (501(c)(3)) organizations.8 As a result, we treated the

same number of precincts and produced the same flier design for both candidates. Second, Sa˜o

Paulo is the financial center of Brazil, and the city’s mayor carries significant weight in Brazilian

politics. The 2008 election had an ex-governor of the state of Sa˜o Paulo and the runner-up

presidential candidate in the 2006 election; in addition, Brazil’s most recently elected democratic

presidents (Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Ina´cio da Silva (Lula)) maintain strong ties to

the city. Finally, as a result of Sa˜o Paulo’s immense size – it is the largest city in Brazil and the

seventh largest in the world with an estimated population of 11 million and 8,198,282 voters in
2008 within the municipality itself – the city offers considerable heterogeneity in the education

and socioeconomic status of individual voters.

Did Voters Already Know About the Dirty List?

A necessary, but insufficient, condition for information about candidates’ corruption record to

have an effect on voting behavior is voter ignorance about the candidates’ placement on the

Dirty List. To find out whether or not voters already knew about the accusations, in the week

after the election, we conducted a survey (N=200) of Sa˜o Paulo residents living near polling sta-

tions in the field experiment control group with the aim of obtaining information on voters’ pre-

treatment knowledge of the Dirty List, as well as their opinions related to corruption in govern-

ment. Since the treatment was never administered in these precincts, knowledge among surveyed

voters should reflect knowledge among voters prior to the intervention. We used cluster sam-

pling, in which we chose 20 control group precincts, and then randomly sampled ten households

with the vicinity of the selected precincts.

Was the Sa˜o Paulo electorate aware of the Dirty List and the fact that the two major candidates

were included on it? Our survey data suggests that this is not the case as only 25 percent of

respondents answered that they had heard of the Dirty List. Of those who knew about the Dirty

List, only 48 percent knew that both candidates were on it, 30 percent identified only Suplicy as

being on the Dirty List, and 22 percent identified only Kassab as being on the Dirty List. Thus,

only 12 percent of all respondents could correctly place both Kassab and Suplicy on the Dirty

List. Given this relatively low level of knowledge, informing voters potentially could change

their views of the candidates and consequently their behavior on election day.
Behavioral Responses to Increased Information: Field Experimental Evidence

The Intervention

To inform voters of the corruption convictions of politicians, we designed two fliers – one for

each candidate in the run-off election. The fliers are pictured in Figure 1 with their respective

translations.9 The flier design incorporates aspects of political propaganda that are similar to

other political marketing material in Brazil, while also intending to have credibility in the

information it is conveying. Both fliers have newspaper articles from Folha de Sa˜o Paulo, one of

the country’s most respected periodicals, detailing the corruption allegations of each candidate.

We also included the case numbers of each court case to increase the credibility of the

information in the fliers.

Evidence from a Survey Experiment

To better understand our findings and to take advantage of individual-level data, we embedded a

survey experiment modeled after the field experiment in the post-election survey discussed in

Section 4.1. While we are interested in the overall impact of the fliers on voter attitudes, the

survey experiment also allows us to test some of our hypotheses explaining the divergent effects

found in the field experiment. In particular, we take advantage of the survey experiment to test

our hypothesis that Suplicy’s supporters’ views are more affected by learning about her

placement on the Dirty List than the views of Kassab’s supporters when they learn about his

corruption record. Working only in field experiment control precincts, we randomly assigned
200 respondents with equal probability to be given the Kassab flier, the Suplicy flier, or a

placebo flier showing basic biographical information for both candidates (shown in Appendix

II).19 After the respondents read the fliers, the interviewers asked the interviewed voters to

“grade” Kassab and Suplicy on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 indicated being strongly against the

candidate and 10 indicated that the respondent was strongly in favor of the candidate.

After asking respondents to read the fliers, we asked the interviewed voters about the believ-

ability of the accusations, as well as their seriousness. If voters perceived the Suplicy accusations

to be more believable or serious, then this difference could explain the disparate behavioral re-

sponse to the fliers. We find no evidence for either explanation. Only 30 percent thought the flier

was mostly or completely false; most voters exposed to the Suplicy flier said that the accusations

were mostly or completely true. For those exposed to the Kassab flier, the proportions are very

similar: only 28 percent thought the flier was mostly or completely false. When it comes to the

seriousness of the accusations, once again there were few differences by flier. 80 percent and 78

percent of voters exposed to the Suplicy flier and Kassab flier, respectively, thought the accusa-

tions were very serious or serious. The similarity in voters perceptions of the two fliers provides

evidence that differences in the fliers or their content are not an explanation for why the Marta

flier was more effective at changing voting behavior than the Kassab flier.

Do voters punish corrupt politicians at the ballot box? In principle, elections allow voters to vote

corrupt candidates out of office (Besley 2007). But, the empirical evi- dence is mixed: while

some studies find evidence of punishment (e.g. Klašnja 2015), others do not (e.g. Chang et al.

2010). As a result, recent studies focus on identifying factors that mitigate the electoral
sanctioning of corruption. For example, voters appear less willing to sanction corrupt politicians

who belong to their preferred party (e.g. Anduiza et al. 2013). In this paper, we expand this

emerging literature on the mitigating factors of corruption voting.

We are grateful to Fernanda Boidi and the LAPOP Lab for feedback on our survey experiments.

We also thank Catherine De Vries and Miriam Golden for their helpful comments. We presented

an earlier version of the paper at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the European Political Science

Association. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this

article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the

Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10. 7910/DVN/N0ZRDZ. The authors have no

conflicts of interest. NL and MK conducted the statistical anal- yses. MK wrote the first draft of

the paper. All the authors contributed to the research design of the experi- ments and the paper,

as well as revising and editing the manuscript.

We use survey experiments to examine two important mitigating factors that have so far been

studied only observationally or theoretically. We evaluate the extent to which corruption voting

is mitigated when: (a) corruption is perceived to be wide- spread, potentially inducing voters to

ignore it and focus on other aspects of politicians’ performance or character, and (b) corruption

brings direct benefits to the constituency, potentially incentivizing voters to trade off these

benefits for electoral support.

Survey experiments on vote choice do not necessarily match real-world voting (Boas et al.

2019), partly because voters need to coordinate their expectations (Arias et al. 2019; Chang et al.

2010). But, they do reveal something about public preferences (Hainmueller et al. 2015), in

themselves important objects of investiga- tion. Here, we are less interested in the overall effect

of corruption on voting than we are in different mitigating factors, results that are less likely to
be driven by response biases. Moreover, studies like Ferraz and Finan (2008; but see Avis et al.

2016: 21) and Klašnja (2015) have found substantial electoral costs for corrupt politicians, so it

is unlikely that anti-corruption voting only appears in the artificial context of survey

experiments.

Our second contribution is design-based. To date, most experimental studies on corruption and

voting have tested one or two mitigating factors in isolation. Such approaches have several

important limitations: (a) they provide little information about the relative importance of

different mitigating factors; (b) they cannot shed light on potential interactions between different

mitigating factors; and (c) treatment effects in such designs may be compounded, or even

confounded, by other important factors that influence corruption voting but are left out (Dafoe et

al. 2018).

To address these limitations, we employ a conjoint experimental design that ran- domizes a

larger number of experimental treatments within the same vignette (Hainmueller et al. 2014).2

We exploit this design to place our mitigating factors of interest in context by comparing them to

two other mitigating factors: co-partisanship and voters’ general tolerance of corrupt behavior.

We also examine interactions between our mitigating treatments and other factors, while

controlling for a range of other features we know can affect corruption voting. These features

ensure that our results generalize beyond prior experimental studies of corruption and voting. To

increase the external validity, we also ran our experiment in three countries with different recent

experiences with political corruption: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. We find strong evidence of

corruption voting: accusations of corruption decrease support by 65% compared to a candidate

praised for efforts to stamp out corruption. While informing respondents that corruption was

widespread in a candidate’s prov- ince does not mitigate the sanctioning of candidates for
corruption, mentioning that corruption has brought construction jobs to the municipality – what

we call side benefits – does, by a substantively meaningful 25%. The size of this mitigating

effect is as large as the mitigation observed among individuals who find bribes justifiable,

and considerably larger than co-partisanship.3 Finally, while the mitigation due to side benefits

broadly applies to a variety of contexts and respondent characteristics, it is more pronounced

among citizens who are more likely to benefit from such rents.

Mitigating corruption voting

Under what circumstances do voters sanction corrupt politicians? To begin, stan- dard accounts

of corruption voting – where corruption is understood as a misuse of public resources for

personal and/or political gains – suggest that less corruption is more desirable (e.g. Besley 2007).

Thus our first, baseline, hypothesis is:

H1: Allegations of corrupt behavior will reduce support for a candidate.

Existing evidence in support of this basic prediction is mixed. One mitigating factor may be the

prevalence of corruption in the wider context. When corruption is wide- spread, voters may

choose to ignore it and focus on other aspects of a politician’s performance or character (e.g.

Rose and Peiffer 2015). They may also believe that there are few or no clean alternatives on offer

(Meirowitz and Tucker 2013) or that corrupt politicians are more effective than clean politicians

(Klašnja et al. 2018):

H2a: Voters will punish corrupt candidates less when corrupt behavior is perceived as
widespread.

Other studies suggest the opposite. Informing voters that corruption is widespread may increase

the salience of corruption in voters’ minds (Klašnja et al. 2016), a process observed more

generally for political phenomena (e.g. Iyengar 1990):

H2b: Voters will punish corrupt candidates more when corrupt behavior is perceived as

widespread.

It is difficult to establish empirically the effect of perceived corruption prevalence with

observational data. Voters in higher-corruption contexts may conceptualize corruption differently

than voters in low-corruption contexts (Pavão 2018). And voter indifference to corruption may

be both a cause and a consequence of its prev- alence. Our research design helps to address these

challenges.

The second mitigating factor we examine is the provision of side benefits to vot- ers. Corrupt

politicians may be forgiven if they share some of the rents with voters (Barberá et al. 2016).

More broadly, punishment may be lower when incumbent performance is otherwise good (e.g.

Klašnja and Tucker 2013; Zechmeister and Zizumbo-Colunga 2013):

H3: Voters punish corrupt candidates less when corrupt behavior brings side benefits to

constituents.

When do voters sanction corrupt politicians?

To estimate treatment effects, we treat each hypothetical candidate as a unique case (i.e. there are
two candidates for every respondent), following Hainmueller et al. (2014) (standard errors are

clustered by respondent). We then estimate OLS models relating respondents’ choices to

indicator variables for each treatment.7 We pool estimates across the three countries and include

country dummies in our specifica- tions.8 Since the economic performance attribute only applies

to the incumbent candidate, we also control for incumbency and an interaction between

economic performance and incumbency.9

The top estimate in Figure 1 is strongly consistent with H1: corruption causes a large drop in

respondents’ support, from about 53% for clean candidates to 18% for corrupt candidates – a

65% reduction.10 The effects of the economy and co-partisanship are also not surprising: a poor

economy decreases the probability of support;11 belonging to a respondent’s preferred party

increases it.12

While the corruption effect is sizable, it is similar in magnitude to other experi- mental studies

from the region (for a review, see Boas et al. 2019). We suspect that the smaller magnitude of the

partisanship effect is a consequence of weak partisan- ship, particularly in Argentina and Chile,

where the effect is close to zero and sta- tistically null (see Supplementary Figure A2).13

Corruption voting also seems to be large relative to the effect of the economy, in contrast to

some previous findings (Klašnja and Tucker 2013). But it is difficult to know how respondents

envisioned the improved and worsened economic conditions signaled in the vignette, or how the

magnitudes of these economic changes compared to the magnitude of corrup- tion. Probing these

contrasts is an interesting question for future research.

Impact of Corruption on Electoral Process in Nigeria

Electoral corruption has many negative impacts on Nigerian politics and governance. It leads to

violence, ballot stuffing, ballot boxes snatching, alteration of elections results, rigging,

intimidation, people are maimed and killed during elections and losers outwit the winners and

imposed themselves on the electorates (Micheal, 2013) and candidates are imposed on the

electorates by the ruling elites or power brokers as against their wish (Abdulganiyyu, 2014). The

rigging of electoral process and corruption led to post election violence as in the case of 2011

General Elections where post elections violence erupted particularly in Northern Nigeria.

Corruption or electoral corruption led to massive looting of billions of dollars or trillions of

Naira from public office holders for instance, it is discovered that a whooping sum of $ 2.1

billion ((N777, 133,624,337, 580.00 billion) was diverted by PDP ruling government in 2015

during elections which was initially meant for procurement of weapons to fight Boko Haram

insurgency (EFCC, 2017). The resultant effect was a massive destruction of lives and properties

in many parts of Northern Nigeria by the Boko Haram insurgency. Electoral corruption did not

only led to stuffing of ballot boxes, stealing of ballot boxes, alteration of results, underage and

multiple voting, intimidation of voters and harassment of opposition but, also it leads to

manipulation and delay of election tribunal verdicts and blockage of justice in all segments of the

society (Olarinmoye, 2008).

Corruption in the electoral process succeeded in obliterating the integrity of security agency in

Nigeria as Police sector that is supposed to provide security of lives and properties are found on

many occasions to be accomplice in rigging of elections and other dubious acts that rendered

electoral process faulty (Idowu, 2010). The most damaging effect of corruption in the electoral

process however, is, most Nigerians despaired in the entire system and lost confidence in
democratic governance and its dividend (Eke, 2016).

Voters

Vote buying is a normal norm in Nigerian politics and is done openly without any iota of doubt

or fear by the politicians and their front men. In the case of 2015 General Elections, votes were

openly bid by politicians from the proceeds of corruption and indeed, the process of vote buying

itself is a corrupt practice. One of the informants consulted in this work for instance revealed

that, he saw nakedly the case of PDP bidding votes for N 500 ($ 1.3) but when they sensed

danger of losing they raised the amount to N 1000 ($ 2.8). The electorates were just required to

vote for them, snap the ballot paper with their smart phones, present it to them and get their share

of spoils.

This issue of vote buying has been witnessed severally in Nigerian politics as a result of extreme

poverty, hunger, deprivation, illiteracy and political culture of money politics. Many

international observers reported such cases across the country during elections since 1999. Apart

from vote buying, electorates were sponsored by politicians through giving them meager amount

of money to engage in criminal activities during elections such as ballot stuffing, ballot boxes

stealing, intimidation of voters and opposition and political thuggery.

THE DEMOCRATIC PRACTICE MODEL

Democratic practice involves a constant struggle between society and State in which society

demands some level of the essence of democracy mixed with some level of dictatorship and the

State provides what it considers a balanced mixture. Some level of dictatorship is always

required as a control function to avoid anarchy. The relationship between the dictatorship

component and the democracy component of democratic practice demanded by society is such

that when one increases the other decreases - an inverse relationship. The amount of democracy

content or level of democracy depends upon the amount of the dictatorship content or level of

dictatorship.

The components of democratic practice within societies may be operationalized to enable the

level of democratic practice to be measured and compared. At the level of internal or local

politics, the constituents of the level of dictatorship, X, include, the degree of regulation, the

degree of centralization of political power, degree of political repression, the ability of the

political executive to act without consultation, level of police brutality, and level of political

violence. The constituents of the level of democracy, Y, include the level of cultural

compatibility, freedom of speech, degree of availability of opportunity for individual

participation, degree of multicultural harmony, level of tolerance of political opinion, level of

respect for individual rights, degree of consensual decision making, and degree of

decentralization of political power. Both the level of dictatorship and the level of democracy may

be obtained indirectly through attitudinal research on their constituents. Techniques used in

assessing these components may include Thurstone

, Likert, and Semantic Differential Scaling available in standard textbooks on research methods.

It is emphasized that without the dictatorship component, democratic practice might degenerate

into mobocracy and without the democracy component, democratic practice might degenerate
into tyranny.

EXPLANATORY POWER OF THE MODEL

The curves are asymptotic to the axes and convey the message that there is no perfect democracy

and there is no perfect dictatorship. A study of the values of K and its influence on the sketch of

the family of rectangular hyperbolas shows that the higher its value, the further away a curve is

from the axes. For any given value of the dictatorship content of democratic practice, the higher

the value of K, the higher the level of democracy. K is therefore a measure of how democratic

practice has matured. The lower the value of K the closer the curves of the rectangular

hyperbolas are to the axes. It implies that the same curves that are closer to the level of

dictatorship axes are also closer the level of democracy axes and sends the message that those

same societies that may be quick to demand ideal democracy may be the same societies that may

be quick to degenerate into chaos and requiring dictatorial control when faced with a crisis

because their democratic product constant is lower. It explains the prevalence of coups in weaker

economies as the economic crisis deepens. Also for any given value of K, the higher the level of

dictatorship, the lower the level of democracy and vice versa.

When K remains the same, but the dictatorship and democracy contents of its democratic

practice change, a society may move along the a particular rectangular hyperbola. Thus, a

society’s movement along a rectangular hyperbola with K fixed implies changes in its

dictatorship and democratic constituents.

Under conditions of, prosperity, peace and harmony, a country may choose to increase its
democracy content and reduce its dictatorship content. It explains why the prosperity of the West

has encouraged an increase in democracy content, but it is emphasized that peace and harmony

are equally important. In an emergency situation such as war, more power may be concentrated

in the hands of the political executive to enable quick decisions to be made without appreciable

change in the nature of the political regime.

This concentration of power leads to an increase in the dictatorship component and a decrease in

the democracy component while K remains the same. When the challenges are overwhelming

and last long enough, the dictatorship component may so increase and the democracy component

so decrease that democratic practice jumps from one value of K to another. If the value of K so

changes in response to changes in the dictatorship and democracy contents, then a country’s

democratic path may change from one rectangular hyperbola to the other. We may call this

change a regime transition and when this regime transition changes the democracy component

dramatically, a democratic transition may be said to have taken place. A democratic transition

may therefore be negative or positive.

Voters’ predispositions

The level of education, laboural situation, professional background, gender, age, socio-economic

status and level of social trust have been mentioned in the literature as variables that might

predispose voters to punish or tolerate corruption at the ballot box.

Banfield was probably one of the first authors to consider that cultural practices and social
imaginaries affect the way citizens perceive corruption and point out that, in a society with

“amoral familism”, nobody will defend the group or the community interest, unless it gets

personal adventages for doing so ([8]: 83–84). In a similar vein, Redlawsk and McCann [108]

conclude that ‘residents of small cities and towns think about corruption in somewhat different

terms than citizens living in large metropolitan areas’ and suggest that ‘older Americans and

women are more inclined to apply the label corrupt to any number of behaviors in politics, even

those that are not strictly illegal’.

For a large number of authors, the propensity to punish electorally an incumbent involved in a

case of corruption depends largely upon voters’ levels of education. Individuals have different

skills to deal with and interpret information concerning the integrity of their candidates. Barberá

and Fernández-Vázquez [9] underline the relevance of education for understanding a complex

thing such as corruption and allocating responsabilities to candidates, politicians or public

officials. In the case of Mexico, McCann and Domínguez [84] point out that ‘better educated

voters are more likely to accurately perceive the incidence of corruption in their cities’.

Similarly, Pérez Díaz [95] argues that, in Spain, Partido Popular supporters are better educated

than Socialist Party supporters, hence they are more prone to punish corruption at the ballot box.

Caínzos and Jiménez [17] could not test this idea. Víctor Pérez-Díaz uses the composition of the

electorates as a variable to undestand tolerance to corruption in the 1993 and 1996 Spanish

general elections. The fact that Partido Popular’s voter were mostly young, educated and urban

individuals, argues the author, can explain a greater moral sensitivity to scandals because they

were more concerned about public issues and more demanding of their representatives. Caínzos

and Jiménez [17] tested this hypothesis and the result was negative. The belief that highly

educated voters are less prone to tolerate corruption is a contested one.

Other studies suggest a direct link between partisanship and electoral tolerance of corruption.

Partisans tend to show more biased evaluations of the incumbent’s performance [34, 68] and are

less likely to punish corruption among their candidates and politicians [4, 26, 33, 51]. Stoker

[134] analyses Gary Hart’s affair and showed how partisan support to the incumbent is not

homogeneous and, after a scandal, can turn into hostile judgments on the candidate’s character.

Low-awareness voters may have less knowledge and understanding of the conse- quences of

corruption, but they may be more sensitive to the media’s hyper- sensationalism and assume a

more anti-establishment position. Moreover, sophisti- cated voters tend to be more

knowledgeable of and more concerned about policy issues, and thus downplay the importance of

integrity to assess a candidate’s perfor- mance in office.

In this sense, Michael Johnston [61], remarks that more educated citizens, as well as those with

better income, might be better informed about politics, and thus might be more aware of and less

offended by narrow-minded, self-interested government officials. Those who are unfamiliar with

the often petty give-and-take of politics could have higher expectations of altruistic behaviour.

Moreover, individuals with higher status might be accustomed to receiving particular benefits

and services from government. Jackson and Smith [57] raise a similar point in their comparison

of elite versus non-elite beliefs about corruption in New South Wales, Australia.

Corruption scandals can have a different meaning from one individual to another and play

greater or lesser role in structuring voters’ choice. However, information about a given

corruption scandal does not necessarily mean that citizens will be shocked or surprised. This

only happens when there is a discrepancy between citizens’ expectations or visions about

political life and the contrasting nature of what is reported in the press [106].
Gender has also been listed as an individual feature that is likely to affect voters’ tolerance to

corruption [57, 80, 100]. Swamy et al. [138] consider that countries where more women are both

in Parliament and in the laboral market show lower levels of perceived corrupion. Husted [56]

argues that, in countries where women are more empowered, politicians are more likely to stress

the importance of ethical issues. The assumption that women are more honest than men [138] has

been contested ([137]) or not validated by survey data [32].

Age is an individual-level variable that points towards contrasting conclusions. For Gardiner

[45], there is a negative correlation between age and the severity of ethical judgments. In other

words, younger voters tend to be less tolerant towards corruption. Gibbons [48] observed an

inverse relationship with regard to illicit party financing and conflict of interests’ affairs. Jackson

and Smith [57] argue that the level of condemnation was higher at either end of the scale and less

so for the intermediary age groups. Mancuso et al. [80] argues the opposite: toleration is more

common among elder and younger voters.

The literature also stresses that the laboural situation of voters, in particular unemployment,

strongly affects their electoral behaviour and preferences [82, 105]. Due to their precarious

situation, those unemployed or sub-employed suffer more and are expected to be more sensitive

to grand corruption if they are aware of its negative impact in economy. However, Jeanne

Becquart-Leclercq [12] alerts us to the exis- tence of two levels of anchorage of social

judgements: a symbolic level, where corruption is always perceived as a “bad thing”, and a

strategic one, where citizens weigh the costs and benefits of their actions and engage in

corruption (even if they consider it an immoral practice) to solve their problems and satisfy their

needs. This paradox is of great importance to understand why citizens, notwithstanding

condemning corruption, openly continue voting in corrupt politicians or close their eyes to some
practices in their administration that have become a routine and socially acceptable. Although

citizens in a precarious situation may be very sensitive to grand corruption and easily align with

anti-establishment and anti-parliamentarian protest voting during general elections, when it

comes to local elections they will vote strategically and condole their incumbent’s misdeeds in so

far as they have directly benefitted from his/her policies.

La Porta et al. [74] and Della Porta and Vannucci [29] consider that higher levels of institutional

trust are quintessential to voters’ responsiveness to corruption. When citizens do not trust the

State as an agent to solve their problems with fairness, impartiality and efficiency, they will look

for alternative means to address their needs and turn a blind eye to the incumbent’s corruption.

This hypothesis needs further testing, since one of the paradoxes observable in recent years is the

lack of electoral punishment of corrupt behaviour in advanced democracies with higher levels of

social capital and a more informed citizenry.

Voter’s justifications for not throwing the rascals out

There is no single reason why voters do not punish corrupt candidates during elections. Although

this article does not attempt at general theorising on the reasons and conditions that lead voters to

tolerate corruption, we make a modest contribution to the understanding of why electoral

punishment of corruption fails to materialise by discussing seven theory-grounded exploratory

hypotheses/dimensions. Voters do not “through the rascals out” at the ballot box because:

They lack truthful/validated information about the candidate’s wrongdoing;

They do not trust Justice and, consequently, they downplay the importance of judicial

indictments or court sentences to gauge the candidate’s integrity;

They never question the party’s selection of candidates: their candidate right or wrong, is always

their candidate; They are direct beneficiaries of the incumbent’s discretionary, clientelistic or

non-programmatic redistributive policies of public decisions, benefits and services;

Their participation in politics is primarily determined by the fulfilment of their own interests and

basic needs, hence they value efficacy above any other ethical standard, such as integrity,

transparency or even legality; They believe that power corrupts and that by definition all

politicians are corrupt, hence it does not matter whom you vote, since there are no “clean”

alternatives.

They do not consider integrity as an electorally relevant issue: parties and candidates get elected

for their programmes and for the results of their policies while in office.

Let us now explore more in detail each of these hypotheses.

Voters lack truthful/validated information about the candidate’s wrongdoing

One of the problems addressed in the literature is that voters may lack access to credible

information ([141]: 3). According to Klasnja [64], ‘less-informed voters are found to be

significantly more likely to vote for incumbents accused of corruption relative to clean

incumbents than their well-informed counterparts’. For this author, ‘an across-the-board increase

in political awareness would systematically reduce the support for malfeasant incumbents’ ([64]:

1).

However, Klasnja admits that less informed voters might compensate their lack of information

through reference groups [76, 77, 130], “gut-level” reasoning [104], or simple retrospective

judgments of incumbent performance [43, 131].

Not only has corruption become a recurrent issue during elections, it has also been used as a

weapon to damage the image of political opponents. In such a context of politicisation, it is

inevitable that targeted politicians seek to persuade voters about their innocence. Because these

allegations are hard to prove beyond reasonable doubt in such a short period of time, it is logical

that citizens ignore these legal tests of the candidate’s integrity and vote for him/her.

Despite voters ignoring the candidate’s legal situation, lack of information ‘cannot explain all

instances of voting in favour of a corrupt candidate’ [100]. In some cases, regardless of the level

of information on the candidate’s legal liability, voters decide to support him/her anyway. One

major shortcoming of this hypothesis is that it believes that, because voters condemn corruption

in general, they will undoubtedly vote against it if they really know that a politician is corrupt [ 1,

47, 139, 141]. However, as Chang and Kerr [26] pointed out, perception and tolerance are two

different things. The authors define perception of corruption ‘as the degree to which citizens

believe that a political actor or entity is in engaged in corrupt practices’, whereas tolerance

‘denotes citizens’ proclivity to condone political actors’ engage- ment in corruption’ ([26]: 4).

Using data from Africabarometer, they show that ‘variation in corruption perceptions does not

necessarily account for variation in corruption tolerance’. Perception and tolerance are ‘shaped

by different factors and have different political consequences’ ([26]: 4).

Some studies prove that voters will punish corrupt politicians if they have credible information

about their wrongdoing. The Brazilian case corroborates this thesis. In 2003, the Brazilian

government launched an anti-corruption program. Several munici- palities were randomly

selected to be audited. The main objective was to assess the use of municipal funds and

encourage civil participation in monitoring public expenditures. Based on the assumption that

citizens disapprove of corruption but do not have enough information to punish corrupt
politicians, Ferraz and Finan [40] state that the publication of the audit results reduced the

probability of corrupt Mayors’ re-election. In those municipalities where at least two corruption

acts were reported, the probability of re- election decreased 7 percentage points. Moreover,

Mayors who got re-elected despite being involved in corruption cases got fewer votes. According

to the authors, social condemnation was severer in municipalities that had local radio stations. In

addition, the dissemination of audit results through local radio stations favoured non-corrupt

Mayors. In short, Ferraz and Finan [40] consider that voters update their perceptions about the

integrity of politicians through credible information and, in this way, they change their voting

behaviour. For them, perception and intolerance of corruption go hand in hand.

Brollo [16] analysed ‘the role the central government plays in the Brazilian anti- corruption

program in circumstances in which corrupt practices are accompanied by high levels of federally

transferred recourses’. According to the author, the loss of reputation of corrupt politicians does

not matter in a context of clientelism. For her, central Government played a major role in

fighting corruption by reducing the amount of transfers to politicians revealed to be corrupt.

When corruption was reported, the national authorities in Brasilia reduced the amount of

infrastructure transfers to the corrupt municipalities. However, it reduced those transfers

selectively according to party affiliation ([16]: 27). Brollo’s suggestion is that, in Brazil, voters

punished corrupt politicians ‘because they know about the corruption evidence, but only care

about corruption because it may cause a reduction in transfers’ ([16]: 3).

One of the weak points of Bollo’s analysis is that it is based on the assumption that voters are

rational, hold similar preferences, knowledgeable of what goes behind the political scenes and

have sufficient competences to assess the real impact that changes in the overall budget have
upon their particular economies. The view that the transfer of infrastructure funds is key to all

local economies is also misleading.

Notwithstanding that voters have sufficient information about the ethical conduct of their

candidate, and are aware of his/her involvement in corrupt exchanges, they may still decide to

support him/her. This downplaying of corruption in elections results from a paradox of social

condemnation: although voters are conscious that corruption causes severe social, economic,

institutional and political damage, they are still prepared to tolerate it in so far as their personal

interests are satisfied. According to Jeanne Becquart-Leclercq [12], this paradox is explained by

the fact that there are two levels of anchorage of people’s judgments about corruption: a

symbolic level, based on abstract morals, and a strategic one, based on the application of

morality to real circumstances. These two levels are not always in accordance.

Democracy and Democratic Practice in Nigeria

Democracy is a laudable system generally acceptable in all civilized polity. Its gains are only

realizable through the electoral process. For this reason, electoral process is perceived as the

conveyor or channel through which democracy and its dividends are actualized (Anichebe,

2007). Thus, without an appropriate electoral process which allows the people to freely choose

their representatives, democracy remains a mere slogan. Democracy in its simple definition

means “the rule of the people”. Lincon‟s definition of democracy which is the most popular sees

it as „„government of the people, by the people and for the people”. Agundu (2007) defined

democracy as the rule of the people expressing their sovereign will through their votes. Going by
the foregoing definitions, it means that in democracy, the ultimate authority of government

resides in the people so that public policies are made to conform to the will of the people and to

serve the interests of the people.

Generally, the common way of determining the wishes of the people is through election, it is

only when the masses are allowed to express their choice of candidate in free, fair and credible

elections where democratic principles are followed that democracy is said to have taken place.

The philosophical basis and fundamental ethos of democracy is “free choice” by the people.

However, in Nigerian situation, the opposite is the case. According to Jega (2007), civil rule in

Nigeria have been characterized by heightened incidence of poverty, ethno-religious conflicts

and generalized insecurity, all of which serve as legitimate grounds for raising many pertinent

questions like: the relationship between democracy and development; management of ethno-

religious conflicts in a democratic transition in a complex plural society such as Nigeria, and

building or consolidating democracy in a situation of an acute economic crisis and conflicts.

On this note, Ibeanu (2007) succinctly perceived that:

…Nigerians do not attach great promissory content or a psychological value of their vote is

grossly devalued and mandates claimed by politicians are effectively dubious... Nigerian voters

and politicians alike know that votes are unequal and that the action of corrupt electoral officials,

party leaders, security agents and the Presidency do count more in determining electoral

outcomes than votes ... the bulk of Nigerian voters have no illusions about the importance of

their votes and there is no psychological satisfaction in voting because they know that either the

votes will not be counted or the voles will not count.

Despite the introduction of Card Reader and partial electronic voting system by the former INEC

Chairman, Professor Attahiru Mohammed Jega to strengthen electoral integrity, local

government elections conducted by SIECs across the country failed to observe the rules of the

game, thus scuttling the integrity of elections at the local levels. The above statement shows that

Nigeria is yet to start the practice of democracy since the people are alienated and are deprived

from expressing their will. Local Government Council elections which ought to be the major

nursery for democratic participation being is the closest to the people has been perverted. Where

the will of the majority cannot prevail, it is strange to call such practice democracy. For

democracy to be responsive and work effectively, the masses must see and appreciate the fact

that political leaders have the public goods at heart and do respond to the reasonable demands of

the citizenry. For instance;

It is only in Nigeria that politicians would promise the people “heaven on earth” as campaign

manifesto and cunningly deny after assumption of office with the peoples vote. Succinctly, how

to be accountable has been a hydra-headed challenge facing members of Nigerian political class

though there is presence of “Freedom of Information Act” passed by the 7th Senate (2011–2015)

of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The complaints of citizens aired through the mass and social

media, protests and peaceful demonstrations have been relegated to the background by

successive governments in Nigeria (PAUL, Orokpo & Ojo, 2017).

In democracy where the popular will prevails, it leads to governmental responsiveness and

accountability. Responsiveness and accountability are both necessary for effective democratic

governance, Dennis (2008) noted that responsiveness and accountability are twin virtues of a

well-run democratic society. He added that responsiveness in democratic government means the

government is responsive to the yearnings of the people while accountability means the existence
of checks on public officials to ensure that they will function in a responsive and responsible

manner and the potential of levying of negative sanctions on political leaders who strays from

the standards. These are the tenets of democratic governance which political godfatherism has

thwarted and scuttled in the Nigerian polity. Unless these ideals are allowed to function in

Nigerian democratic project, the system will continue to experience friction and instability.

Why Do Voters Support Corrupt Politicians?

Scholars propose a number of explanations for variation in corruption across countries. Some

attribute levels of corruption to differences in electoral or political institutions, linking federalism

and presidentialism to increased corruption and decentralization and plurality elections to lower

levels of corruption.7 Beyond institutional explanations, some scholars point to inherited or

cultural attributes to explain a society’s tolerance of corruption.8 Others suggest that countries

can become stuck in a trap where the pool of available candidates includes only corrupt

politicians.9

Although much of this literature makes assumptions about voter behavior, few authors explicitly

examine the effects of corruption on individual political attitudes and behavior. Our research

focuses directly on understanding how individuals process information about corruption when

deciding how to cast their votes. Irrespective of institutional structure, corrupt politicians cannot

survive electorally without the support of voters. We explore two possible sources of this

support: either voters lack informa- tion about corrupt behavior and therefore unknowingly
support a corrupt politician (the information hypothesis), or they knowingly support a corrupt

politician because of his performance in other areas (the tradeoff hypothesis).10

The Information Hypothesis

There are a number of reasons voters may lack information about political corruption. For

obvious reasons, politicians try to conceal their illicit activities. Efforts to obfuscate corruption

are likely to be more successful where there is a lack of resources and pro- fessionalization

among the media, which is an acute problem especially in middle- and low-income

democracies.11 Insofar as voters are not aware of corruption, they cannot vote against corrupt

candidates.12 Even when allegations of corruption are made public, voters may discount these

reports, especially if they take the form of politically moti- vated partisan accusations.13 If a lack

of information explains voter support for corrupt politicians, voters should be expected to

withdraw support from corrupt politicians once specific, credible, and accessible information

about corruption becomes available.

Much of the cross-country research on the institutional correlates of corruption assumes that the

information hypothesis holds true. Margit Tavits expects that voters will “punish a government

for any increases in the perceived level of corruption com- pared to the level of corruption under

the previous government.”14 Daniel Treisman argues that democracies have less corruption

because “exposure [is] more likely,” implying that, when exposure occurs, voters will remove

corrupt politicians from office.15 John Gerring and Strom Thacker postulate that increased

openness and trans- parency should be associated with a lower incidence of corruption.16 Alicia
Adserá, Carles Boix, and Mark Payne say that, if voters have mechanisms available to hold

politicians accountable, corruption will decrease as information provision increases.

The information hypothesis has received mixed support in a recent wave of natu- ral and field

experiments.17 For example, a field experiment in rural India finds that a publicity campaign on

the social costs of corruption has no effect on either voter turnout or the support politicians

receive at the polls.18 Alberto Chong, Ana De La O, Dean Karlan, and Leonard Wantchekon

find that in Mexico distributing information about an incumbent’s corrupt behavior in office

depresses turnout but, depending on the amount of corruption, has only a small negative effect

on the incumbent’s vote share.19 On the other hand, Claudio Ferraz and Frederico Finan take

advantage of a natural experiment in Brazil generated by randomized federal auditing of munici-

palities, and find that incumbent mayors who engage in multiple acts of corruption lose electoral

support when compared to their less corrupt counterparts.20 Miguel de Figueiredo, Daniel

Hidalgo, and Yuri Kasahara find that distributing flyers with infor- mation about corruption by

both candidates in the 2008 São Paulo mayoral race depressed voter support for one candidate

but not for the other.21

Models of democracy theory

It is customary to distinguish between three overall clusters in theories of democracy: elite

theories, plu- ralist theories and theories of direct democracy, which (internal differences untold)

comprise delib- erative and participatory approaches (Held, 1996). Each of these suggests

different roles for citizens’ participation in the democratic process.

In the elite tradition democracy is basically con- ceived as struggles for power between narrow

elites.

The role of ordinary citizens is limited to participa- tion in regular elections, which ensure that

govern- ing elites can be ousted from power. Other than that, the citizenry is considered to be

spectators of the po- litical game. The elite tradition foresees that a strong role for expertise and

technocracy is inevitable in complex societies, whether this is seen as deplorable as an iron cage

of Sachzwang (Weber, 2002) or a positive movement towards a more rational society.

The pluralist tradition claims that policy-making in liberal democracies should be determined by

a plurality of groups, which effectively mirrors the in- terests of society through the interplay of

the differ- ent interest groups and organisations (Dahl, 1989). In addition to participating in

elections, ordinary cit- izens are expected to participate by involving them- selves in

organisations that represent their interests in the political arena. Politics is thus essentially a

bargaining process between representatives of dif- ferent social interests. Different types of

expertise can be mobilised to serve as a resource in such bargaining processes.

The elite and pluralist theories in combination form the conceptual basis of most empirical work

in comparative politics. We refer to the two traditions together as theories of representative

democracy. These theories have generally not devoted much at- tention to the use of science and

expertise in con- temporary society, although this is beginning to change (Brown, 2006). The

understanding and con- trol of scientific knowledge is seen as an instrumen- tal resource, which

can be struggled over, not something which in and of itself is political (Turner, 2003).

Theories of representative democracy have at- tracted criticism from proponents of direct

democra- cy. This tradition claims that all aspects of social life (including S&T) are in some
sense political and should be the object of democratic autonomy. It attacks one of the central

tenets of pluralist democracy theory, that democratic politics is primarily an expression of private

views and interests. The main source of democratic legitimacy is not the fair weighing of the

fixed preferences of the citizens, but the process of preference formation through public debate

and de- liberation. The focus is thus on the way in which dif- ferent actors learn from each other

through deliberation and arrive at solutions that are ideally, both substantially competent and

normatively fair (Webler and Renn, 1995).

countable to elected representatives of the public. Conceptions of direct democracy experienced

a re- vival with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which were critical of

existing repre- sentative democracies. These criticisms entailed ‘participatory’ and ‘deliberative’

currents, which have significantly influenced the debates about expanded public engagement in

STS scholarship.

Proponents of participatory democracy theory criticise representative democracies for offering

only very limited possibilities of participation to ordinary citizens, which leads to a depoliticised

public with little influence over their own lives (Sclove, 1995).

Consequently, democratic procedures should not be restricted to politics in its more narrow and

legal sense, but should also be extended to other key insti- tutions of society, including the

domain of knowledge production and technological innovation. Deliberative

democracy stresses the quality of po- litical debate as a means to develop viable solutions

Principles of inclusion

In the representative tradition, an important aspect of democratic sovereignty relates to the

equality of citizens: the interests of all citizens should be given equal weight in decision-making

processes. It is therefore essential that those passing judgement on behalf of the citizenry are

representative of the larger public. This usually leads to demands that partici- pants in such

procedures must be statistically repre- sentative of the general population. From this perspective,

criticism is due when processes are cap- tured by minority interests (Horlick-Jones et al., 2007).

Quality of decision-making

The representative tradition assumes that citizens have relatively stable, pre-defined interests.

Politics is therefore an arena where different groups struggle to have their interests recognised.

For this struggle to play out in a fair manner, it is essential that decisions are made in a

transparent fashion and that the deci- sion-makers can be held accountable for their deci- sions.

Criticism is due when the basis on which decisions are made and who is accountable are not

transparent (Rowe and Frewer, 2000).

In the direct democratic tradition, interests and preferences are not considered to be given in ad-

vance, rather they are shaped in deliberations. There- fore, the critical standard is not (only)

whether the decision-making process is transparent and decision- makers can be held

accountable, but whether deci- sion-makers are genuinely open to arguments. Criti- cism is thus

due when decisions are reached through bargaining and compromise in the absence of delib-

erative argumentation (Webler and Renn, 1995).

self-governance: the possibility that those affected by decision-making will be able to take part in

and influence decisions. The central criterion for public involvement is therefore whether all

legitimate in- terests have been given the opportunity to articulate their concerns. In this
perspective, criticism is due when particular voices are excluded, especially those of vulnerable,

affected groups that may have difficulties mobilising collectively.

Why Do Voters Support Corrupt Politicians?

Scholars have proposed a number of explanations for the disparities in the amount of corruption

across countries. Some attribute varying levels of corruption to differences in electoral or

political institutions. Federalism and presidentialism have been linked to increased corruption,

whereas decentralization and plurality elections for legislators are associated with lower levels of

corruption (Treisman 2000; Fisman and Gatti 2002; Adsera, Boix and Payne 2003; Persson,

Tabellini and Trebbi 2003; Gerring and Thacker 2004; Kunicova and Rose‐Ackerman 2005;

Golden and Chang 2006). Others have explored whether regulatory systems and the availability

of rents create incentives for corruption (Shleifer and Vishny 1993; Djankov, et al. 2002; Ades

and Di Tella 1999). Beyond institutional explanations, inherited or cultural attributes might

explain a society’s tolerance of corruption (La Porta, et al 1999; Treisman 2000; Fisman and

Miguel 2006). Other authors have suggested that countries can become stuck in a trap where the

pool of available candidates includes only corrupt politicians (Kurer 2001; Caselli and Morelli

2004; Messner and Polborn 2006).

Here, in contrast, we focus on understanding the individual behavior of voters in a democracy.

Without the support – knowing or unknowing – of voters, corrupt politicians would not survive
electorally. We examine the extent to which an individual’s choice to vote for a corrupt politician

can be explained either by a lack of information or by a rational tradeoff.

Experimental Validity

Before turning to the results, we first discuss the experiment’s validity, both internal and

external. Beginning with the former, we check that the vignettes were appropriately randomized

and that respondents are not systematically different across vignettes. To do this, we run two

multinomial logit models where the 12 categories of treatment assignment define the outcome

variable. We compare a null model with no predictors to a model with predictors for gender, age,

education, social class, indicators for employment status, an indicator for being Catholic, an

indicator for being religious, an indicator for being nonwhite, indicators for being a likely PSDB

or PT voter and indicators for being a PSDB or PT partisan. A likelihood ratio test fails to reject

the null hypothesis that the two models are indistinguishable (p < 0.93), meaning that no

meaningful correlations are detected across the treatment conditions and respondent

characteristics. This validates the success of the randomization.

We also check whether respondents understood the prompts in the expected manner. Do

respondents treat information about bribe‐taking as evidence of corruption, and do they treat

information about accomplishing public works as evidence of a politician’s competence or

capacity? We check this by examining correlations between the different stimuli and

respondents’ answers to follow‐ up questions in the survey. Asked if the mayor was trustworthy,

those in the corruption treatments were 66 percentage points less likely (p < 0.00) to say that the

mayor was very or somewhat trustworthy than those in the non‐corruption treatments. Similarly,
respondents who were told that the mayor had accomplished many public works projects were 23

percentage points (p < 0.00) more likely to say that the mayor was very competent or somewhat

competent at securing federal funds for the municipality as compared to those respondents who

were told that the mayor had accomplished few public works projects. These results suggest that

respondents understood the information about bribes and public works provision as we had

intended.

Do Politically Interested Citizens Support Corrupt Politicians?

In the above discussion of social class effects, we suggest that the greater tolerance for corrupt

yet competent politicians among respondents in the highest social classes might be due to

political sophistication. Although we do not have a direct measure of political sophistication or

knowledge for our respondents, we do have information about political interest, which is likely

to be closely related (Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Prior

2005). Funk (1996) finds that politically‐knowledgeable respondents react differently to

information about scandals involving politicians depending on the type of scandal. In our data,

we describe as politically interested the subset of respondents who report discussing politics with

their friends and family very often (as compared to often, rarely or never). The number of

respondents who fall into this highest interest category is small, a little over six percent of our

sample. These respondents are more likely to be male, highly educated and members of the

upper class than the average respondent.

As table 4 shows, this subgroup appears to value competence more than those who are not as

interested in politics. Fifty percent of politically‐interested respondents who received a vignette

about a corrupt but competent politician said that Gabriel(a) would vote to reelect the mayor, a
rate much higher than that among the not‐politically‐interested subset (p < 0.06). In addition,

those who received a vignette about a clean and competent politician were almost universal in

their belief that Gabriel(a) would vote to reelect the mayor. Looking at the off‐diagonal cells for

the politically interested, we see that respondents in this group were almost as likely to say that

Gabriel(a) would vote for a corrupt but competent politician as that Gabriel(a) would vote for a

clean but incompetent one – the two proportions are statistically indistinguishable. All three

results are very similar to those we find for respondents in the highest social classes. Once again,

this suggests a willingness to make a rouba, mas faz tradeoff among a particular group of voters.

Although we do not measure political information directly, these politically interested

respondents may be more knowledgeable and sophisticated political observers. These voters may

treat the delivery of public goods as a difficult task and therefore be (1) more tolerant of

corruption when a mayor is competent, (2) particularly supportive of competent and clean

mayors and (3) particularly critical of incompetent mayors. As an indication that these voters do,

in fact, attach greater importance to the information about public goods provision, we find that

they are more likely than other voters to attribute skill to the mayor in other areas. Whereas 88

percent of the highly interested respondents in the competent treatment conditions said that the

mayor would be very competent or competent in acquiring federal resources for the municipality,

only 65 percent of other respondents thought this.

These significantly different (p < 0.01) assessments of the skills in another area of a mayor who

is described as good at creating public works projects provide evidence that high‐interest voters

are interpreting information about competence in a more positive light than the average voter.