Exploiting daily records documenting how an organization of high-level bureaucrats in Argentina collected bribes and delivered them to party leaders from 2009 to 2015, I detect with unprecedented accuracy a political corruption cycle in narrow temporal windows around national elections. Bureaucrats, on average, collected about $350 thousand more in bribes and were 9.6 percentage points more likely to deliver cash to politicians on days within two weeks before elections than within two weeks after elections. These results are puzzling from the perspective of theories of democratic accountability, which predict that corruption should decrease with electoral proximity, but follow naturally when the factor motivating corruption is the need to finance political expenses. This article’s findings confirm that the motivation behind corruption is often to advance political goals rather than personal enrichment, and that competitive elections shape incentives for corruption in more complex ways than traditionally thought.

Rulers of modern states consolidated control over territories that were previously complicated mosaics of private political jurisdictions. Systematic information about this process is sparse. This article analyzes village-level transition paths between jurisdictions—royal, seigneurial, and ecclesiastical—in northern Castile in the period. It quantifies how much power different types of lords preserved or lost to the Crown in the long run and also offers conjectural estimates showing that exposure to opportunities for trade led to more resilient and larger royal domains—at the expense of secular lords, but not of the Catholic Church.

Prominent scholars argue that Europe’s political fragmentation improved the security of property rights, thereby promoting growth. We explore a complementary mechanism: urban fragmentation—the proliferation of self-governing cities—helped emancipate labor, and freer labor promoted both faster and more correlated town growth. To test these hypotheses, we first show that polities with more self-governing cities offered more protection to runaway serfs against lordly recapture. We then show that more fragmented areas exhibited both faster and more correlated urban growth. While both the property rights and labor freedom mechanisms predict faster growth, only the latter predicts more highly correlated growth.

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