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Birds of a feather flock together: trust in government, political selection and electoral punishment

Public Choice volume 184, pages 263–287 (2020)Cite this article

If it proves that I cannot trust the local policemen, judges, teachers, and doctors, then whom in this society can I trust?’ The ethics of public officials become central here, not only with respect to how they do their jobs, but also to the signals they send to citizens about what kind of ‘game’ is being played in the society.

Rothstein and Eek (2009, p. 90).

Abstract

Although often at the heart of the public debate, the underlying determinants of political selection and voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians remain poorly investigated. This paper contributes to our understanding of those issues by showing that places, such as Italy, where social norms are weak and trust in government is low, also feature adverse political selection and low levels of electoral punishment of corrupt politicians. Our measure of trust in government is based on the occurrence of cheating by Italian schoolteachers. We show that untrustworthiness is strongly related to both the malfeasance of local representatives and to low levels of electoral punishment of them.

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Fig. 1

Source: see Table A.1 in the online "Appendix A"

Fig. 2

Source: Data provided by Nifo and Vecchione (2014), Charron et al. (2014) and Tabellini (2010).

Fig. 3

Source: See Table A.1 in the online "Appendix A"

Fig. 4

Source: See Table A.1 in the online "Appendix A".

Notes

  1. According to Uslaner (2008, p. 290), “generalized trust represents a sense of social solidarity, a belief that other people, especially people unlike yourself, are part of your moral community”.

  2. As explained by Golden and Chang (2001), Italy represents an extreme case of political corruption in an established democratic setting. The evidence that wealth does not account for perceived corruption should be considered as an exception to be included in any theory of political corruption. Italy offers a unique source of data on political corruption in terms of RAPs. Owing to the “Clean Hands” investigations since 1992, Italy offers one of the most important single sources of information about the nature, extent and functioning of general political corruption in a modern democratic system.

  3. For a detailed review of the results on empirical indicators of social capital, see Grootaert and van Bastelaer (2001).

  4. Bjørnskov and Sønderskov (2013) revived the relevance of social capital, confirming that it is comprised of multiple dimensions.

  5. We also test with the single measure of cheating or standardize by its standard deviation. The empirical findings are similar to those reported here.

  6. The measure of constraints on the executive was coded for different 40-year windows around the years 1600, 1700, 1750, 1800 and 1850; it takes values from 1 (unconstrained authority) to 7 (maximum accountability and constraints).

  7. Unlike Chang et al. (2010), we do not consider the XI (1992) and the XII legislatures (1994) since the political scandal of “Clean Hands”, that took place in those two legislatures, would impart bias to our estimates.

  8. Furthermore, Chang et al. (2010) report that, differently from the XI (1992) and the XII legislatures (1994), from 1948 to 1987 the average reelection rate of politicians already involved in corruption scandals was closer to the reelection rate of other politicians. That evidence minimizes the potential risk of politicians’ selection bias.

  9. In fact, the totality of political parties and a large fraction of the politicians active in the 1948–1987 period no longer are present in the 2007–2009 political scenario.

  10. In the "Appendix", Table A.1 supplies details on variable definitions and data sources, whereas Table A.2 reports descriptive statistics.

  11. The electoral rule for seats in the Italian House of Representatives between 1948 and 1987 was a pure proportional system. Thus, deciding to normalize the RAP and S_RAP variables for inhabitants seems to us the correct choice.

  12. In the observed time span, we have 32 electoral districts.

  13. As far as we know, in Italy, blood donations are done on a voluntary basis and do not entitle blood donors to receive any amount of money.

  14. In their "Appendix" the authors check for alternative measures of social capital based on principal-component analysis.

  15. For convenience, in the following estimates we report only the variables of interest. The full estimates are available from the authors upon request.

  16. The variable was coded for different 40-year windows around the years 1600, 1700, 1750, 1800 and 1850; it takes values from 1 (unconstrained authority) to 7 (maximum accountability and constraints). For more details, see Tabellini (2010).

  17. To provide a comparison with the results obtained by Nannicini et al. (2013), we also report in "Appendix A" the estimates using blood donations as a measure of social capital. Specifically, in each column of Tables A.5 and A.6, we estimate a baseline model analogous to the baseline estimates in column 1 (using blood donations) of Table 4 and in column 4 (using the cheating index) of Table 5. The only difference is the exclusion of dummy variables for macro geographical areas (i.e., North-West, North-East, Center, South, Islands), owing to the large correlations of those geographical areas with our instruments.

  18. Incidentally, average per capita blood donations as measure of social capital seems to suffer endogeneity in explaining politicians’ misbehavior.

  19. We also test potential endogeneity using as instruments the Institutional Quality Index (Nifo and Vecchione 2014) and the European Quality of Government Index (Charron et al. 2014), with results analogous to those reported here. The results are available from the authors upon request.

  20. For convenience, in the following estimates we report only the variables of interest. The full estimates are available from the authors upon request.

  21. As a further robustness check and to offer an additional comparison between the two measures, in "Appendix A" we also report the estimates for two subsamples based on the median of blood donations and trust in government, respectively (Nannicini et al. 2013). Operationally, we split the sample by pooling the observations lying above or below the median values of blood donations and trust in government. Specifically, in both Tables A.7 and A.8 columns 1 to 4 represent the estimates of the split samples based on the median of blood donations in the electoral districts. Similarly, columns 5 to 8 report the estimates of the split samples based on the median of our measure of trust in government at district level. Tables A.7 and A.8 show that the incidences of RAP or S_RAP cause electoral punishment of politicians involved in misbehavior in the electoral districts exhibiting high levels of trust in government. Incidentally, the magnitude of the coefficients on electoral punishment seem slightly smaller than in the estimates based on blood donations.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Editor-in-chief, the two guest editors of the special issue on Legal Corruption and, two anonymous referees for comments and suggestions. We are also indebted to all the participants to the ICS 2nd Workshop on Corruption, Ilinois State University, Chicago, for stimulating discussions. Finally, special thanks go to Juan F. Vargas for his contribution in enhancing the first version of the manuscript; Francesco Drago, Domenico Lisi and, Angelo Mazza, for their invaluable help in improving our work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Law, Economics and Humanities, Mediterranean University of Reggio Calabria, Via dell’Università 25, 89124, Reggio Calabria, Italy

    Massimo Finocchiaro Castro

  2. Department of Economic and Business, University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Calogero Guccio

  3. Health Econometrics and Data Group, University of York, York, UK

    Massimo Finocchiaro Castro & Calogero Guccio

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  1. Massimo Finocchiaro Castro
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Correspondence to Massimo Finocchiaro Castro.

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Finocchiaro Castro, M., Guccio, C. Birds of a feather flock together: trust in government, political selection and electoral punishment. Public Choice 184, 263–287 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-019-00759-4

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Keywords

  • Trust in government
  • Social capital
  • Legal corruption
  • Political corruption
  • Electoral punishment

JEL Classification

  • P16
  • D72
  • Z13