Corruption and re-election: how much can politicians steal before getting punished? |
| |
| Institution: | 1. Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC), EUREF Campus 19, Torgauer Str. 12-15, Berlin 10829, Germany;2. IZA, Bonn, Germany;3. Leibniz Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung (IOS), Landshuter Str. 4, Regensburg 93047, Germany;4. Department of Economics, University of Bologna, Strada Maggiore 45, Bologna 40125, Italy;5. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia;1. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Berkeley, United States;2. The Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China, Princeton University, United States;3. School of Economics and Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China;4. Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, China;1. Asian Development Bank, No. 6 ADB Avenue, Mandaluyong City 1550 Philippines;2. Department of Economics, University of Messina, Piazza Pugliatti 1, 98122 Messina, Italy;1. Department of Economics, College of Economics, Jinan University, Address no. 601, Huangpu Street West, Guangzhou, China;2. Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, United Kingdom |
| |
| Abstract: | Can corruption be used to improve re-election chances of politicians in office? What is the optimal level of corruption for doing so? In this paper I use suspicious patterns of public procurement allocations in local government as a proxy measurement of corruption, based on combining quantitative and qualitative evidence on corrupt practices in local government. I then tie suspicious procurements to re-election probabilities of mayors in Croatian cities and municipalities from 2009 to 2017, and find that due to a rent-extracting relationship formed between firms and political elites, local politicians can engage in potential corruption and still win elections. There is an optimal level of suspicious procurements for which politicians maximize their re-election chances. When a mayor surpasses the cut-off level of around 20% of suspiciously allocated funds from public procurement his or her probability of re-election starts to decline, while he or she loses office for at least one half of all procurements allocated suspiciously. In order to address potential endogeneity issues I apply a fuzzy regression discontinuity design based on population thresholds that determine the size of the local council, where the intensity of the treatment (potential corruption) increases with increasing council size. The results overall confirm the hypothesized nonlinear relationship between corruption and re-election. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
| 本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录！ |
|
