Corruption Voting in the World's Least Corrupt Country
P1-S27-4
Presented by: Zoltan Fazekas
Why do voters sometimes support corrupt politicians in elections---and how do voters expect political parties to respond if their candidates are implicated in wrong-doing? In this paper, we study voter support---or punishment---of candidates involved in different types of political malfeasance. Unlike conventional corruption voting studies, we focus not just on the candidate election stage, but also on voters' normative beliefs about how the party leadership should respond to candidates implicated in acts of corruption. To this end, we marshal evidence from a conjoint experiment embedded in a nationally representative survey collected in Denmark---a low-corruption context with a relatively weak regulatory environment for money in politics. Our experiment varies candidate wrong-doing from small and seemingly insignificant acts to more severe forms of corrupt behaviors. We analyze multiple outcomes related to candidate evaluation, voters' willingness to tolerate candidates involved in different kinds of wrong-doing, as well as how voters believe political parties should respond when their candidates are (alleged to be) involved in malfeasance. Our paper expands upon existing work on corruption voting by showing that voter responses matter not just for implicated candidates but also for affiliated parties, since voters also hold distinct normative beliefs and expectations on how the leadership of political parties should respond to corruption within their ranks. In this way, democratic accountability operates not just on election day, but also in-between elections through public pressure on party leadership to handle cases of corruption in a normatively appropriate way.
Keywords: Corruption voting, money in politics, accountability, survey experiment, Denmark