There has been a significant growth of social media as a means to inform oneself about politics. This article explores the consequences of this trend on the credibility audiences attribute to news exposing corrupt politicians and on their willingness to penalize the exposed politicians in elections. The study focuses on ten Latin American cities and employs a randomized control trial using experimental data embedded in a survey. Through this method, credibility and penalization levels are compared between state communications, newspapers, named journalists on social media, and anonymous journalists on social media. The article’s key findings demonstrate that corruption reports published on social media are deemed less credible than those published by state auditors and newspapers. This effect is exacerbated when the source of the report is anonymous. In addition, reports on corruption published on social media by anonymous sources have a negative effect on voter penalization of corrupt politicians.

Research that examines the impact of economic, social, and political factors on political corruption uses expert’ and citizen’ perceptions for measuring corruption and testing arguments. Scholars argue that the perception of corruption is a good proxy for actual corruption because data on actual corruption are limited and not entirely trustworthy. However, perception indexes do not allow for testing separate mechanisms driving citizen’ perceptions of corruption from actual levels of corruption in different government branches. To address this issue, I introduce a new index based on Latin American countries to measure the risk of corruption in political parties. Using a de jure analysis of laws and regulations, the Risk of Corruption (ROC) index evaluates the likelihood of political parties engaging in corrupt activities. Instead of measuring corrupt activities or perception directly, the ROC measures the risks of involving in corruption. The index has important implications for academics and practitioners in anti-corruption issues. First, it allows us to test arguments about the role of political parties and legislatures in reducing political corruption. Second, it helps to understand how political parties could improve their internal organization to decrease the risk of corrupt activities. Finally, it is a valuable instrument for cross-national studies in diverse fields that study political parties.

It is widely acknowledged that poor government policy performance undermines public trust in government. However, there has been insufficient study of how citizens attribute responsibility to different levels of government within an authoritarian unitary context. Inquiry is needed to assess the ways government performance in various policy domains affects central–local political trust. This study uses the case of China to addresses these questions. Results show that, in particular, local governments risk losing public trust for corruption. Nevertheless, the central government loses public trust due to unsatisfying economies. Both local and central governments lose public trust for poor performance regarding environmental protection, food safety problems, public health, and primary/middle school education. The central government cannot always avoid blame, depending on different policy issues. The results indicate that the perceived administrative responsibility of different levels of government affects citizens’ evaluations of the performance of the central and local governments as well as their political trust.

This article analyzes the relationship between corruption offenses and money laundering with reference to the Spanish Penal Code. These two criminal categories lack a certain definition, as there is no such univocal concept of “political corruption” and “money laundering.” The reasons for the denaturation of these criminal figures will be addressed. Then, the paper will expose how these criminal figures relate to each other. We argue that a real concurrence between both figures is possible, although it may lead, in certain cases, to double incrimination and its consequent punitive excess. Therefore, we will propose some criteria for a restrictive interpretation of “money laundering” to avoid confusion with other legal figures such as “confiscation.” The paper will end with reference to the Spanish Criminal Code’s regulation on “confiscation” and a brief review of the main critics.

In this essay I take issue with the problem of institutional corruption. A number of scholars have recently established a discontinuity thesis, according to which an institution may be corrupt even if its members are not. Against this view, I defend a continuity thesis and argue that institutional corruption can always be traced back to the blameworthy corrupt behavior of individual agents. Certain instances of corrupt behavior spread their effects and tip in a way that subvert (and not simply violate) the public rules that govern an institution. This occurs, I argue, following either summative, morphological, or systemic modalities. I show that such a taxonomy of institutional corruption is useful for the purpose of disentangling and understanding the variety of mechanisms that generate the phenomenon. Most importantly, the taxonomy allows for a more nuanced way of attributing responsibility for political corruption, including collective responsibility. I conclude that a continuity approach offers the tools for diagnosing institutional corruption, but also facilitates the task of formulating answers to political corruption, both from a backward-looking and from a forward-looking perspective.

Corruption of public officials is the silent killer of the U.S. economy, and we should reflect carefully on how it might be reined in. That’s the thought behind campaign finance laws. But broad grants of discretion to authorities, which might work in New Zealand, are more likely to be abused in low-trust America, and campaign finance laws are one example of this. First Amendment free speech rights, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, represent its reflection on the American character and the possibility of abuse when Congress tries to restrict political speech. So conservatives are apt to think, and not entirely without reason.

The corruption of public officials and institutions is generally regarded as wrong. But in what exactly does this form of corruption consist and what kind of wrong does it imply? Recent proponents of the “institutionalist approach” to political corruption have concentrated on those occasions when incentive structures distract institutions from their essential purpose and weaken public trust. The corruption of individual public officials has been less relevant to their work, except for when it leads to the erosion of the functioning of institutions. From this perspective, a clear emphasis has been put on the consequences of corruption. In contrast, I argue that political corruption, whether individual or institutional, can be more fundamentally understood as a form of political injustice in which someone has violated the logic of mutual accountability that undergirds all relations of justice in rights-based systems. In this sense, political corruption occurs when public officials use their entrusted power of office for the pursuit of an agenda whose rationale may not be vindicated as coherent with the terms of their mandate. By focusing on the inherent qualities of corrupt political relations, I lay out a novel relational and deontological understanding of the inherent wrongness of political corruption as a form of unaccountable action.

This article examines the effect of corruption on ideological voting. Linking previous studies of political corruption with theories of ideological voting, it argues that when corruption is high, voters place less importance on ideology when voting than they otherwise would. The reason for this effect is related to voters’ reduced ability to accurately perceive parties’ positions and to their low political efficacy in these contexts. Using data from ninety-seven elections from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, the study shows that in countries with high levels of corruption, voters consider ideology less in their voting decisions, partially because they face difficulties identifying parties’ ideological positions and/or they do not believe parties can implement their electoral programmes. These relationships hold even after controlling for socio-economic and political confounders and for voters’ increased likelihood of abstaining when corruption is high.

Angola is a large country with a relatively small population and abundant natural resources, including oil reserves. The high price fetched by oil, the mainstay of the Angolan economy, on international markets has helped this leading producer attain growth rates that are among the highest in the world. However, Angola is also noted for its unequal distribution of wealth and notorious political corruption. This article seeks to explore this paradox within the framework of the so-called resource curse theory and analyze the role played by the oil industry in the process.