Corruption, Party Leaders, and Candidate Selection: Evidence from Italy

Abstract

Corruption, Party Leaders, and Candidate Selection: Evidence from Italyresearch indicates that voters are not particularly effective at removing corrupt politicians from office, in part because voters make decisions on the basis of many competing factors. Party leaders are much more single-minded than voters and will choose to deselect implicated legislators if it means maintaining a positive party reputation and improving the odds of winning a legislative majority. We examine renominations to italy's legislature in two periods marked by corruption. We compare these renomination patterns with those from the prior legislature, when corruption lacked political salience. Our analysis shows that incumbent renominations are negatively associated with the number of press mentions that link the incumbent to corruption-but only when corruption is salient to the public. Our study highlights the importance of party leaders in forcing malfeasant legislators out of office-and reducing corruption-and redirects attention from voters to political elites as a critical channel in enforcing democratic accountability.

Partisan bias in politicians’ perception of scandals

“…They play a central role also for politicians. One reason is that political parties generally hold a firm grip on who runs under the party banner during elections (Asquer et al, 2020; Gallagher and Marsh, 1988). Moreover, politicians rely on the party hierarchy to advance their political career and obtain positions of power (Dowding and Dumont, 2008).…”

“…First, politicians may realize that a scandal in their own party impacts upon their own electoral prospects. Any reduction in a party brand’s electoral value (Desposato and Scheiner, 2008; Lupu, 2014) as well as its ethical and non-policy reputation (Asquer et al, 2020) can indeed cause voters to punish other politicians running under the damaged party label. That is, if my co-partisans do something wrong, this makes me look bad too.…”

“…A scandal’s damage to the party image is unlikely to remain contained at the level of government where the scandal occurs. In effect, the impact of scandals often spills over across levels of government, particularly for highly salient scandals that grab public (and media) attention (Asquer et al, 2020; Chang et al, 2010). This highlights that, for instance, a scandal at the national may be a cause for concern for all co-partisans, regardless of their level of government.…”

“…Yet, large-scale scandals generally implicate only a fraction of politicians, and may cause or exacerbate internal divisions within parties (Kam, 2009; Plescia et al, 2020). This raises important questions about how politicians ‘on the sidelines’ of a scandal – including, for instance, colleagues and party leaders (Asquer et al, 2020) – perceive the impact of such events, and whether these perceptions are affected by politicians’ partisan affiliation. In this article, we address this research gap by asking: Do politicians perceive a scandal differently when it implicates members of their own party rather than another party?…”

“…This latter aspect, however, can come with an important downside when a scandal hits a party. The party name and insignia may then bring up negative associations to voters, which imposes electoral costs upon all politicians within the party (Asquer et al, 2020; Daniele et al, 2020; Desposato and Scheiner, 2008; Lupu, 2014). This, we argue, has implications for the way politicians perceive scandals occurring in different parties.…”