Political decentralization and corruption: Exploring the conditional role of parties

Abstract

This study investigates how national levels of corruption are influenced by the interaction of two factors in political decentralization: the presence of local elections and the organizational structure of national parties. Previous studies have focused primarily on the role of fiscal decentralization on corruption and have mostly ignored the institutions of political decentralization. Using new data in a series of expansive models across multiple countries and years, we find that corruption will be lower when local governments are more accountable to and more transparent toward their constituents. This beneficial arrangement is most likely to occur when local elections are combined with nonintegrated political parties, meaning that party institutions themselves are decentralized from national control. Such an institutional arrangement maximizes local accountability by putting the decision to nominate and elect local leaders in the hands of those best in a position to evaluate their honesty—local electors.

Fiscal Decentralization and Public Infrastructure Maintenance Expenditures: A Cross-Country Panel Analysis

“…The GFI data were acquired from NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System hosted by the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University. 2 Recent studies have shown the geographic complexity index is a strong determinant of fiscal decentralization (e.g., Canavire-Bacarreza et al, 2017; Shrestha et al, 2023). The second IV is the geographical size of a country measured by the land area of a country.…”

“…Our main explanatory variables are the aggregate measures of fiscal decentralization. Following previous studies (e.g., Shrestha et al, 2023; Viñuela, 2015), the degree of fiscal decentralization is measured by revenue decentralization and expenditure decentralization. Revenue decentralization captures the share of revenue of subnational governments (local and regional) as a share of general government revenue.…”

“…Fiscal Decentralization and Road Maintenance Expenditures (Country Surface Land Area as IV)Fourth, we use alternative measures of political decentralization. FollowingShrestha et al (2023), we use the local government index from the V-Dem dataset as an alternative political decentralization measure. The local government index captures the extent to which elected local governments can operate without political interference from upperlevel governments.…”

Determinants of differences in RT-PCR testing rates among Southeast Asian countries during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…However, these studies were criticized for predominantly concentrating on examining the impact of fiscal decentralization on corruption while largely overlooking organizational structures and dynamics of national parties. A more recent study [ 50 ] looked into how political context factors into corruption and found that the presence of local elections and party institutions decentralized from national control compel locally elected officials to be more accountable and transparent toward their constituents, which could possibly reduce levels of corruption.…”

Does corruption rule the auditor's soul? Examining the auditors' attitude toward accepting corruption behaviors

“…Corruption is unarguably seen as a significant obstacle to corporations, political development, and countries' worldwide economies (Campante et al, 2009; D'Agostino et al, 2016; Shrestha et al, 2022). This is because corruption distorts business incentives for investment enhancement, undermines both public and private institutions, increases business costs, and promotes the illegal export of public resources (Everett et al, 2007; Truex, 2011).…”