Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Corruption and Incumbency Disadvantage in New Democracies

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award satisfies Division B, Title V, Sec. 543 of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013 (P.L. 113-6, enacted on March 26, 2013). The project addresses corruption in emerging democracies, an issue critical to political stability in the world. Developing an understanding of political corruption is therefore vital for US national security interests. The project addresses an important puzzle: why does it seem that incumbent politicians are disadvantaged (less likely to win re-election than to be defeated by challengers) in many new democracies, and what role does corruption play in this process? Intellectual Merit: The project develops and tests a theory that proposes that incumbent corruption -- misuse of office for private gain -- is an important source of this disadvantage. Corruption is known to be higher in younger and poorer democracies than in established richer democracies. When voters cannot know exactly who is corrupt, there are many conditions under which voters will generally favor a challenger over any incumbent. This includes if the majority of politicians are corrupt, if potentially corrupt incumbents are rare but particularly rapacious, or if corrupt politicians can learn quickly how to better extract resources (i.e., become "more efficient at being corrupt"). Empirically verifying this hypothesis is challenging because corruption is difficult to observe and measure precisely, and because many factors related to corruption -- such as poverty or inequality -- may instead account for the incumbency disadvantage. To address these challenges, the project relies on extensive data to infer incumbent corruption in a study of Romanian mayoral elections, including: (1) more than 4,000 publicly available declarations of assets to detect abnormal wealth accumulation among incumbents; (2) over 1 million contracts by local public companies to identify suspiciously high prices, uncompetitive bids, or politically-connected awardees; (3) a comparison of budgeted expenditures on infrastructure with data on changes in its actual physical stock to identify leakages in public funds spending; and (4) data from more than 10,000 firms to uncover corrupt privatization of state property inherited from communism. Further, the project takes advantage of a unique institution in Romania: by law, the salary of the mayor increases once a city's population exceeds a certain threshold. Prior research has suggested that better pay decreases the need for illegitimate income and attracts more upstanding candidates for office, resulting in lower corruption. This rule permits a comparison of the incumbency (dis)advantage in cities with populations just above and below these salary thresholds. Cities near these thresholds should be similar in many other important respects except for the mayor's salary (and so, by extension, corruption). This strategy holds constant other potential causes of incumbency disadvantage and isolates the effect of corruption. Broader Impacts: Studying incumbency disadvantage in a young democracy such as Romania is important for several reasons. While incumbency disadvantage may be a desirable response to corruption, it also likely induces high policy instability and discourages high quality candidates from running for political office. Both high policy instability and low quality of political elites can threaten economic and social stability, and ultimately endanger the prospects for enduring democracy and economic growth. Unstable societies pose threats to international security and trade, including the interests of the United States. Learning how to better anticipate such sources of instability can better inform both foreign policy decisions and anti-corruption programs.