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Party System Institutionalization, Accountability and Governmental Corruption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2016

Petra Schleiter  and
Alisa Voznaya
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Abstract

Why do repeated elections often fail to curb governmental corruption, even in full democracies? While much of the comparative literature on corruption focuses on the institutional features of democracies, this article argues that party system institutionalization is an additional and neglected factor in explaining why corruption may persist in the context of democratic elections. Under-institutionalized party systems impede accountability. They compromise the capacity of voters to attribute responsibility and undermine electoral co-ordination to punish incumbents for corruption. These expectations are tested by combining a controlled comparative study of eighty democracies around the world with an examination of the causal process in a case study of Panama. The findings suggest that party system institutionalization powerfully shapes the scope for governmental corruption.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , April 2018 , pp. 315 - 342
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

Schleiter is at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford (email: petra.schleiter@politics.ox.ac.uk); Voznaya is a former Doctoral Student, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. The authors gratefully acknowledge the advice of Phil Keefer, Matt Loveless, Edward Morgan-Jones, Bo Rothstein, Margit Tavits and Paul Whiteley on earlier versions of this article. They also thank the Editors and the anonymous reviewers for their guidance and feedback. Thanks are also due to Scott Mainwaring, Annabella España and Carlos Gervasoni, who kindly shared their data on electoral volatility, and to the Library of the Electoral Tribunal of the Republic of Panama for making data on elections available. Previous versions of this manuscript were presented in research seminars at the SPIR (University of Kent at Canterbury), the University of Durham and the Quality of Government Institute (University of Gothenburg). Data replication sets available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/BJPolS and online appendices at http://dx.doi.org/doi: 10.1017/S0007123415000770.

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