Political Corruption Cycles: High-Frequency Evidence from Argentina’s Notebooks Scandal

Abstract

<jats:p> 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. </jats:p>

Understanding the Micro-Foundations of Administrative Corruption in the Public Sector: Findings from a Systematic Literature Review

“…One nexus of studies focusing on the relationship between financial motivation (i.e., greed) and corruption provides robust evidence that individuals will, indeed, As a consequence, the salary-corruption relationship is characterized by a U-shape (Y. Chen and Q. Liu 2018) and relates not to the actual salary level but rather to salary satisfaction. While Figueroa (2021) shows that the motive of personal enrichment is not a necessary condition for corrupt behavior, Jäkel (2019) finds that salary dissatisfaction may indeed function as such a condition because it leads to a shift toward unethical professional attitudes, setting the ground for corrupt behavior. This explains why a direct relationship between remuneration and corruption does not generalize across all administrative contexts and cultures (Vveinhardt and Sroka 2020).…”

Varieties of connections, varieties of corruption: Evidence from bureaucrats in five countries

“…Yet, bureaucrats at all levels of the hierarchy may also abuse their position to benefit political patrons (Oliveros, 2021). In corruption for political gain, the forms of corruption available to bureaucrats-such as bribery, extortion or embezzlement-can be similar, but the corrupt resources are obtained by bureaucrats in order to channel them to political actors, be those political parties or individual politicians, who in turn use these resources for their own enrichment or to further political goals-for instance by paying for brokers or votes in clientelist networks (Figueroa, 2021;Gingerich, 2014).…”

Which Jobs for Which Boys? Party Finance and the Politics of State Job Distribution in Africa

“…Despite the demonstrated utility of these approaches, their central focus on the exchange itself elides important questions about benefits that politicians receive from job recipients after the exchange. Job recipients regularly steer policy in politically favorable ways (Peters & Pierre, 2004; Wood & Waterman, 1991), direct goods, services, or favors to voters (Oliveros, 2016; Piattoni, 2001), or divert resources to parties (Gingerich, 2013; Figueroa, 2021).…”