Abstract
While we frequently hope electoral democracy can serve as an important constraint on corruption, there are good reasons to think that such might not be the case. This paper analyzes two closely-related questions: should we expect voters to punish corrupt politicians or parties at the polls, and should we expect such influences to check corruption generally? While there have been clear-cut cases in which such punishments have been massive and decisive, they are much the exception. Indeed, a variety of factors having to do with corruption as a concept and as a political issue, the nature of competitive electoral politics, and more recent economic and political trends reshaping important aspects of liberal democracy, all point toward a pessimistic assessment. Ideas for changing that state of affairs are few, because the difficulties reside less at the level of fixable “problems” and more with the inherent workings of liberal political and economic systems. Efforts to improve the quality of news coverage and civic education, however, and any prospects for strengthening and deepening civil society, may hold out some hope for the longer term.
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Notes
Ironically, transparency measures likely make matters worse, as any donor brave or foolish enough to contribute to a powerful Senator’s or Representative’s opponents must do so on the record, in ways open to scrutiny by the incumbent’s staff. After the incumbent’s re-election, those donors may find their telephone calls going unanswered… More recent trends toward channels for large and often undisclosed contributions may undercut some of that logic, but will do little to enhance voters’ ability to police the political process.
In the United States as well as in other democracies, “opposition research”—digging up unflattering or scandalous information on the other parties’ leaders and candidates—has become big business over the past generation. Personal peccadillos of all sorts are now likely to come to the surface in any campaign, and even a candidate who did nothing more serious in life than squash his best friend’s pet frog are likely to confront those events again, in the form of allegations of a lack of moral fiber.
So, ironically, does the fact that Argentina’s gradual roll-back of 1990s-era privatizations has had little or no effect on corruption (see, for example, [11]).
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Johnston, M. How do I vote the scoundrels out? Why voters might not punish corrupt politicians at the polls. Crime Law Soc Change 60, 503–514 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-013-9477-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-013-9477-3