More politicians, more corruption: evidence from Swedish municipalities

Abstract

In the literature on political economy and public choice, it is typically assumed that government size correlates positively with public corruption. The empirical literature, however, is inconclusive, owing to both measurement problems and endogeneity. This paper creates a corruption index based on original data from a survey covering top politicians and civil servants in all Swedish municipalities. The effect of more politicians on corruption problems is analyzed using discontinuities in the required minimum size of local councils. Despite the fact that Sweden consistently has been ranked among the least corrupt countries in the world, the survey suggest that non-trivial corruption problems are present in Sweden. Municipalities with more local council seats have more reported corruption problems, and the regression discontinuity design suggests that the effect is causal.

What Happens When Municipalities Run Corporations? Empirical Evidence From 290 Swedish Municipalities

“…Running standard OLS-regressions with perceived corruption, tax rate and citizen satisfaction as dependent variables gives the results presented in For the control variables, several associations are as expected: rich municipalities and municipalities with well-educated citizens have lower taxes. For perceived corruption, the control variables have signs similar to those reported in Bergh et al (2017). Some of these results are in line with theoretical expectations, such as perceived corruption being slightly lower where local newspapers are present.…”

“…Williams and Brick 2018), and the response rate was at least 50 per cent in 288 of 290 municipalities. Reassuringly, in an attempt to validate the quality of this index, Dahlström and Sundell (2013) found that answers to the questions used not only correlated significantly with answers to similar questions in the indexbased on a total of less than 1,000 respondentsused by Bergh et al (2017), but also with newspaper articles about bribery as well as legal bribery charges.…”

“…Following a recent study on corruption in Swedish municipalities by Bergh et al (2017), we include several theoretically grounded controls for municipality population and median income, the share of the municipal population with tertiary education, the presence of local newspapers and the share of women in the municipal council. Because lack of political competition is sometimes thought to aggravate corruption, we also include a dummy for municipalities where one party has held power from 1973-2013.…”

Factors Predicting the Scientific Wealth of Nations

“…Likewise, a robust negative relationship exists between the size of a country's territory and the measure of the rule of law implemented in the country (Olsson & Hansson, 2011). Larger countries generally have larger governments and more politicians, both of which are potential sources of corruption (Arvate et al, 2010;Bergh et al, 2017;Goel & Nelson, 1998;Kotera et al, 2012), and, as a result, a larger population makes the risk of bribery more likely (Mocan, 2008), which, in turn, may restrict a merit-based (or equal) access to a scientific career and research opportunities.…”

Corruption and Country Size: Evidence Using Firm-Level Survey Data

“…One view is that since a larger government 2003, Billger and Goel (2009), and Goel and Budak (2006). The alternative view is that an increase in government size provides more opportunity for political rent-seeking, causing the politicians and bureaucrats to become more corrupt (e.g., Rose-Ackerman 1978Alesina and Angeletos 2005, Goel and Nelson 1998, Arvate et al 2010, and Bergh et al 2017).…”