IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/pscirm/v4y2016i02p379-397_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Rooting Out Corruption or Rooting for Corruption? The Heterogeneous Electoral Consequences of Scandals

Author

Listed:
  • Fernández-Vázquez, Pablo
  • Barberá, Pablo
  • Rivero, Gonzalo

Abstract

Corruption scandals have been found to have significant but mild electoral effects in the comparative literature (Golden 2006). However, most studies have assumed that voters punish all kinds of illegal practices. This article challenges this assumption by distinguishing between two types of corruption, according to the type of welfare consequences they have for the constituency. This hypothesis is tested using data from the 2011 Spanish local elections. We exploit the abundance of corruption allegations associated with the Spanish housing boom, which generated income gains for a wide segment of the electorate in the short term. We find that voters ignore corruption when there are side benefits to it, and that punishment is only administered in those cases in which they do not receive compensation.

Suggested Citation

  • Fernández-Vázquez, Pablo & Barberá, Pablo & Rivero, Gonzalo, 2016. "Rooting Out Corruption or Rooting for Corruption? The Heterogeneous Electoral Consequences of Scandals," Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press, vol. 4(2), pages 379-397, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:4:y:2016:i:02:p:379-397_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2049847015000084/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Niklas Potrafke & Felix Rösel, 2016. "A Banana Republic? Trust in Electoral Institutions in Western Democracies - Evidence from a Presidential Election in Austria," CESifo Working Paper Series 6254, CESifo.
    2. Montalvo, José G. & Piolatto, Amedeo & Raya, Josep, 2020. "Transaction-tax evasion in the housing market," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    3. Leopoldo Fergusson & Arturo Harker & Carlos Molina & Juan Camilo Yamín, 2023. "Political incentives and corruption evidence from ghost students," Documentos CEDE 20732, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    4. Niklas Potrafke & Felix Roesel, 2019. "A banana republic? The effects of inconsistencies in the counting of votes on voting behavior," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 178(1), pages 231-265, January.
    5. Miguel Ángel Borrella-Mas & Martin Rode, 2021. "Love is blind: partisan alignment and political corruption in Spain," SERIEs: Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Springer;Spanish Economic Association, vol. 12(3), pages 423-451, September.
    6. Nicholas Apergis & Mehmet Pinar, 2023. "Corruption and partisan polarization: evidence from the European Union," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 64(1), pages 277-301, January.
    7. Petr Wawrosz, 2022. "How Corruption Is and Should Be Investigated by Economic Theory," Economies, MDPI, vol. 10(12), pages 1-23, December.
    8. Beesley, Celeste & Hawkins, Darren, 2022. "Corruption, institutional trust and political engagement in Peru," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 151(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:4:y:2016:i:02:p:379-397_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/ram .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.