No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Tsar Putin and the “corruption” thorn in his side: The demobilization of votes in a competitive authoritarian regime
... According to the survey's results in early 2018 (before Russia's presidential election), Vladimir Putin's image was perceived among university students as positive, close to ideal. Studies by other political psychologists, both Russian and foreign, confirm this fact [18,19]. ...
The present study aimed to determine the composition of factors that underlie the images of foreign and domestic political leaders among Russian youth and therefore play a major role in shaping social representations. The research was conducted within the theoretical and methodological framework of the psychosemantic approach, which seeks to reconstruct systems of meanings, both individual and collective, through the investigation of implicit as well as explicit categories of perception. The study comprised two stages, in which participants were administered a psychosemantic questionnaire to evaluate political leaders according to some professional and personal characteristics. The first part was conducted in 2015–2016 with a student sample (n = 147) using a set of political leaders from various countries. In the second part, carried out in 2017–2018, the participants (n = 200) also filled out a questionnaire, this time evaluating modern Russian leaders. A principal component analysis was performed on each of the data sets, revealing that two categories—namely, morality and professional characteristics—are present in both factor structures, whereas other factors are different. Several important theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
In the Global North, corruption is considered incompatible with civic health: scholars argue that it decreases social trust, atomizes communities, and discourages active citizenship. Using the first-ever national dataset from Russia with behavioral measures of corruption, ego-centric networks, and political participation, this article develops an alternative theory of corruption’s impact on civic life in societies where freedoms of association are limited. Analyses of these new data suggest that: (1) Russian bribe-givers are embedded in outward-oriented and mobilizable personal networks, supportive of civic connectivity; and (2) Russian bribe-givers are significantly more likely than law-abiding citizens to mobilize others when pushing back against the state. Counterintuitively, then, in non-democracies, corruption in the public sector sustains the kind of social networks that underlie civic culture.
The article highlights the issue of the modern Russian economy management and the theoretic representations of the general criteria of management. The research contains an analysis of the Russian management figures dynamics for the six broad aspects of management of Worldwide Governance Indicators (World Bank Group). As a result of cluster analysis of the Russian management figures growth rate there have been revealed big and important clusters. The major directions and means of management are as follows: corruption combating – corruption control; government control efficiency – rule of law and regulatory quality; political stability and absence of violence – vote and accountability. In the Russian reality there exists rationality of state government based on the rule of law, regulatory quality, freedom of speech and responsibility for the expression of will. Corruption control is manifested through the visibility of fighting it. As a result of neural network analysis of the importance of growth rates of the Russian management indicators there has been detected an hierarchy of priorities among which the Government efficiency is the most important and the least important are the reign of law, political stability and absence of violence / terrorism.
While democratic accountability is widely expected to reduce corruption, citizens to a surprisingly large extent opt to forgo their right to protest and voice complaints, and refrain from using their electoral right to punish corrupt politicians. This article examines how grand corruption and elite collusion influence electoral accountability, in particular citizens’ willingness to punish corrupt incumbents. Using new regional-level data across 21 European countries, we provide clear empirical evidence that the level of societal grand corruption in which a voter finds herself systematically affects how she responds to a political corruption scandal. Grand corruption increases loyalty to corrupt politicians, demobilizes the citizenry, and crafts a deep divide between insiders, or potential beneficiaries of the system, and outsiders, left on the sidelines of the distribution of benefits. This explains why outsiders fail to channel their discontent into effective electoral punishment, and thereby how corruption undermines democratic accountability.
How does the context of income inequality in which people live affect their belief in meritocracy, the ability to get ahead through hard work? A prominent recent study by Newman, Johnston, and Lown argues that, consistent with the conflict theory, exposure to higher levels of local income inequality leads lower-income people to become more likely to reject—and higher-income people to become more likely to accept—the dominant United States ideology of meritocracy. Here, we show that this conclusion is not supported by the study’s own reported results and that even these results depend on pooling three distinctly different measures of meritocracy into a single analysis. We then demonstrate that analysis of a larger and more representative survey employing a single consistent measure of the dependent variable yields the opposite conclusion. Consistent with the relative power theory, among those with lower incomes, local contexts of greater inequality are associated with more widespread belief that people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard.
A growing literature examines the effect of corruption on political behavior. However, little attention has been paid so far to the fact that politicians engage in it for various reasons and with different welfare consequences. In this article, I argue that voters judge corrupt politicians differently depending on what the money is used for. I show results from a survey experiment in India in which respondents heard about a politician who accepted money for a political favor. One treatment group was told that the politician used the money to personally enrich himself (personal corruption), while the other group was informed that he used it to buy votes (electoral corruption). Respondents who received the vote buying treatment were clearly and consistently less likely to agree with a series of potential punishments. This suggests that the overall welfare consequences of corrupt exchanges are an important factor when voters decide how to judge offending politicians.
In long-standing democracies, the partisan attachments of most citizens are stable and not responsive to short-term political events. Recent studies from younger democracies, however, suggest that partisanship may be more malleable in these contexts. In this paper we develop hypotheses about how political corruption might affect voter attachment to the parties of corrupt officials or to the party system as a whole. Using data from an original survey experiment in Brazil, we show that prompts about political corruption shift patterns of partisan attachment for highly educated respondents – specifically, that corruption associated with one political party reduces nonpartisanship and significantly increases identification with other political parties. In contrast, we find that information on corruption has no consistent measurable effect on partisanship for less educated respondents. We conclude by discussing the implications of malleable partisanship for democratic accountability. © 2015 GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies. All Rights Reserved.
In elections around the world, large numbers of voters are influenced by promises or threats that are contingent on how they vote. Recently, the political science literature has made considerable progress in disaggregating clientelism along two dimensions: first, in recognizing the diversity of actors working as brokers, and second, in conceptualizing and disaggregating types of clientelism based on positive and negative inducements of different forms. In this review, we discuss recent findings explaining variation in the mix of clientelistic strategies across countries, regions, and individuals and identify a few areas for future progress, particularly in explaining variation in targeting of inducements by politicians on different types of voters.
This article analyzes and discusses the objectives of the sanctions implemented by the European Union against Russia and Russian countermeasures against EU member states in 2014-2015, by comparing the official aims with the options expressed in theoretical debates and experiences gained from historical lessons. In principle, the study seeks an answer to the question: what could be realistically achieved as a result of the current form of restricted sanctions and what stays beyond their reach. Methodologically, this article focuses on the evaluation of the ability of theoretical models to explain the logic of anti-Russian sanctions and debates the options of the outcomes of current formation of sanctions in light of theoretical models.
This study assesses the electoral impact of charges of corruption on candidates in the U.S. House of Representatives in elections from 1968 to 1978. The assessment includes a consideration of victory or defeat of alleged or convicted corrupt candidates and an examination of the impact of charges of corruption on turnout and percentage of votes polled by accused candidates. While most candidates charged with corruption were reelected, overall they appear to suffer a loss of 6-11 percent from their expected vote. The type of corruption charge is an important determinant of vote loss. Allegations of corruption appear to have little effect on voter turnout.
The former Communist countries of Eastern Europe have markedly lower levels of voter turnout than Western European countries, which could be a cause for concern if it represents a rejection of democratic values. In this article, we examine what people think about democracy and how these attitudes affect their likelihood of participating in the democratic process. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems drawn from national election surveys in 22 countries in Eastern and Western Europe, we find that citizens in Eastern Europe are more likely to express doubts about democracy and be dissatisfied with how it works in practice. More importantly, while we demonstrate that attitudes about democracy do affect political participation, they cannot fully account for the low levels of turnout observed in post-communist countries. This has implications for our interpretation of the significance of low turnout in national elections.
This article considers how partisanship conditions attitudes toward corruption. Stirred by the puzzle of why corruption does not seem to have the electoral consequences we would expect, it explores whether party supporters are more tolerant toward corruption cases when they affect their own party. The partisan-bias hypothesis is confirmed by a survey experiment carried out in Spain, a country where a number of corruption scandals have been recently visible. The results show that the same offense is judged differently depending on whether the responsible politician is a member of the respondent's party, of unknown partisan affiliation, or of a rival party. Furthermore, the degree of partisan bias depends on political sophistication. This suggests that although partisanship may induce tolerance to same-party corruption practices, the partisan bias disappears when political awareness is high.
Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason.
Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the
institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional
hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition
quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models
is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political
world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented
in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.
Why do ordinary people engage in corruption? Kelly M. McMann contends that bureaucrats, poverty, and culture do not force individuals in Central Asia to pay bribes, use connections, or sell political support. Rather, corruption is a last resort when relatives, groups in society, the market, and formal government programs cannot provide essential goods and services. Using evidence from her long-term research in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, McMann shows that Islamic institutions, secular charities, entrepreneurs, and banks cannot provide the jobs and credit people need. This drives individuals to illicitly seek employment and loans from government officials.
A leading cause of this resource scarcity is market reform, as demonstrated by McMann's analysis of these countries as well as of Uzbekistan and global data. Market reform without supporting institutions, such as credit registries and antimonopoly measures, limits the resources available from the market and societal groups. McMann finds that in these circumstances only those individuals who have affluent relatives have an alternative to corruption.��By focusing on ordinary people, McMann offers a new understanding of corruption. Previously, our knowledge was largely restricted to government officials’ role in illicit exchanges. From her novel approach comes a useful policy insight: supplying ordinary people with alternatives to corruption is a fundamental and important anticorruption strategy.
Available from http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100782620
This article tests the impact of corruption on electoral turnout for over 200 elections from over 70 presidential systems conducted between 1990 and 2011. Differentiating among three corruption indicators (i.e., the International Country Risk Guide corruption indicator, the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, and the World Bank Control of Corruption measure), I evaluate corruption's precise impact on electoral participation in a pooled time series framework. Controlling for compulsory voting, semi-presidentialism, regime type, development, political culture, the closeness of the election, and state size, my results are nuanced. I find that corruption more narrowly defined as political corruption stifles turnout, whereas a rather broad definition of corruption, which includes societal and financial corruption, has no impact on macro-level turnout. Finally, I discover that the interactive impact of corruption on other variables in the turnout function is rather limited.
Since the fall of communism Russia has undergone a treble transformation of its political, social and economic system. The government is an autocracy in which the Kremlin manages elections and administers the law to suit its own ends. It does not provide the democracy that most citizens desire. Given a contradiction between what Russians want and what they get, do they support their government and, if so, why? Using the New Russia Barometer - a unique set of public opinion surveys from 1992 to 2005 - this book shows that it is the passage of time that has been most important in developing support for the new regime. Although there remains great dissatisfaction with the regime's corruption, it has become accepted as a lesser evil to alternatives. The government appears stable today, but will be challenged by constitutional term limits forcing President Putin to leave office in 2008.
This paper concerns the relationship between voters and corrupt politicians. An explanation is suggested for why voters would discount even credible information that a candidate is corrupt. Then the results of an experiment designed to test a necessary condition in this explanation are reported. The principal implication of this exploratory study is that corrupt elected officials are immune from electoral reprisal because voters rather easily trade off the information that a candidate is corrupt in return for other things they value in the candidate.
A growing body of research explores the factors that affect when corrupt politicians are held accountable by voters. Most studies, however, focus on one or few factors in isolation, leaving incomplete our understanding of whether they condition each other. To address this, we embedded rich conjoint candidate choice experiments into surveys in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. We test the importance of two contextual factors thought to mitigate voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians: how widespread corruption is and whether it brings side benefits. Like other scholars, we find that corruption decreases candidate support substantially. But, we also find that information that corruption is widespread does not lessen the sanction applied against corruption, whereas information about the side benefits from corruption does, and does so to a similar degree as the mitigating role of permissible attitudes toward bribery. Moreover, those who stand to gain from these side benefits are less likely to sanction corruption.
Though bureaucratic corruption is widespread, social scientists have yet to develop a comprehensive model predicting ordinary people's engagement in corrupt exchanges with street-level bureaucrats. Our article fills this gap by specifying an individual-level causal model of bureaucratic corruption centered around three theoretically derived predictors: beliefs about acceptability of corruption, its perceived riskiness, and its utility to the offender. In doing so, we develop a theory of how institutional stability affects rates and causal pathways to bureaucratic corruption. Using the data from nationally representative surveys in Russia (N = 2,000) and Ukraine (N = 1,535), we test a path-diagramed structural equation model that accounts for endogeneity and the relationships among the theoretically derived predictors of corruption. The tests of our model in institutionally more stable Russia and less stable Ukraine, combined with OLS regression models on split samples from conflict areas within each country, show that when institutions have greater stability, (1) citizens are less likely to partake in bureaucratic corruption, and (2) the effects of theoretically derived predictors on corruption behavior are stronger. We are the first to incorporate into a theory of bureaucratic corruption a feedback loop whereby engagement in corruption reinforces perceptions of its spread, which in turn contributes to the belief that bribery is acceptable. Our findings explain the variation in corruption behavior among citizens of high-corruption societies, extend the institutional theory of social control, testify to the importance of contextualizing theories of crime, and reveal the need to tailor anti-corruption policies to specific institutional environments. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
The article analyses how the electoral policy of the Russian state predetermined the results of the 2016 State Duma elections. The factors leading to this predictability are described in detail. These were a combination of the introduction of a mixed electoral system, with the party of power winning in more than 90% of majoritarian districts in regional elections; gerrymandering during the establishment of electoral districts; changes to the system by which voters outside the borders of the Russian Federation were allocated to electoral districts; the change of election date (moving it to September) and the consequent reduced turnout in the cities more prone to protest votes; "rigged campaigns" and the systemic opposition's unreadiness for serious disputation; new bans and restrictions on political competition, resulting parties and candidates capable of genuinely opposing the regime being denied access to the elections; a push among protest voters to boycott the election, de facto supported by the regime's campaign managers; and weak campaigns by the democratic parties.
The contemporary electoral system of Russia, once adopted to foster the country's transition to democracy, has been transformed into a crucial pillar of electoral authoritarianism. This study investigates how the principal elements of Russia's electoral system contributed to the consolidation of the authoritarian political order. While certainly not undemocratic in themselves and often borrowed from well-established democracies, the electoral institutions of Russia were assembled into a combination that effectively prevents alternation in power. The study shows that central role in this process was played by learning from error. At each of the stages of transition to authoritarianism, electoral reforms were implemented in order to minimize the risks that were revealed by the previous electoral experiences of the authoritarian leadership.
Democratic elections have been assumed to play a crucial role in curbing corruption among public officials. Voters, due to their general distaste for corruption, are expected to sanction politicians who misuse public office for private gains. Yet, empirical evidence to date is mixed, and it often suggests that the electoral punishment of corruption is rather mild. Recently, political scientists have made great strides in understanding why corruption might be tolerated by voters. In this review, we identify three key stages—information acquisition, blame attribution, and behavioral response—that underlie a retrospective vote based on corruption. A breakdown of one or more of these stages may lead to a lack of electoral punishment of corruption. We also outline some areas for future progress, particularly highlighting the importance of voter coordination for understanding the extent to which corruption is punished at the ballot box.
In The Regional Roots of Russia’s Political Regime, William M. Reisinger and Bryon J. Moraski examine Russian politics at the subnational level in order to discover why democracy failed to take root and how Putin’s authoritarian regime materialized. Since the national regime needed dominant victories in federal legislative and presidential elections, elections were critical to the resurgence of Russian authoritarianism. At the same time, victories without a traditional nationwide political party required that regional politicians help deliver votes. Putin employed a variety of resources to encourage the collaboration of regional leaders during federal elections and to sanction those who would or could not deliver these votes. By analyzing successive federal elections, Reisinger and Moraski show that regions that led the way in delivering votes in Putin’s favor were those that had been both more independent and more authoritarian during the Yeltsin era. These authoritarian enclaves under Yeltsin became models of behavior in the Putin regime, which prized deferential election results. Other regions were quick to follow this lead, functioning during Putin’s ascendancy as “swing states." Still, Russia’s regimes continued to exhibit regime diversity, with democratic enclaves resisting the push to become cogs in the Kremlin’s electoral authoritarian wheel. While motivated by scholarly questions about authoritarianism, democracy, and the influence of subnational forces on national regime trajectories, Reisinger and Moraski also consider policy-relevant questions. © 2017 by William M. Reisinger and Bryon J. Moraski. All rights reserved.
Repeated studies have shown that voters in mature democracies often do not punish corrupt politicians. The majority of existing explanations focus on institutions and their effect on voters’ ability to monitor politicians. In this study, I examine the differences between voters with varying levels of political awareness. The previous literature provides contradicting expectations, suggesting that both the low- and high-awareness voters may be less tolerant of corruption. Drawing on several decades of data on corruption and voting in the U.S. congressional elections, I find that the high-awareness voters are on average less likely than the less politically aware to vote for corrupt incumbents. This association appears to stem from the high-awareness voters’ greater knowledge and better understanding of incumbents’ involvement in corruption. However, partisanship mitigates the differences between the low- and high-awareness voters, as the highly aware are more partisan, and strong co-partisans are more willing to forgive corrupt incumbents.
What drives electoral competition in competitive authoritarian regimes? Most scholarship has assumed that the outcome of these elections is decided by regime manipulation alone. Using three rounds of newly reinstated gubernatorial elections in Russia’s regions, I test this assumption. I identify three distinct measures of competition calibrated to authoritarian elections and assess whether voter preferences or regime manipulation best explain the degree of electoral competition. Relying on new data on protests across Russia’s regions, I find that regions with high protest activity have more contested elections with narrower margins of victory. The results also confirm recent scholarship highlighting the importance of voter turnout for delivering pro-regime victories.
John F. Kennedy's narrow popular vote margin in 1960 has already insured this presidential election a classic position in the roll call of close American elections. Whatever more substantial judgments historical perspective may bring, we can be sure that the 1960 election will do heavy duty in demonstrations to a reluctant public that after all is said and done, every vote does count. And the margin translated into “votes per precinct” will become standard fare in exhortations to party workers that no stone be left unturned.
The 1960 election is a classic as well in the license it allows for “explanations” of the final outcome. Any event or campaign strategem that might plausibly have changed the thinnest sprinkling of votes across the nation may, more persuasively than is usual, be called “critical.” Viewed in this manner, the 1960 presidential election hung on such a manifold of factors that reasonable men might despair of cataloguing them.
Nevertheless, it is possible to put together an account of the election in terms of the broadest currents influencing the American electorate in 1960. We speak of the gross lines of motivation which gave the election its unique shape, motivations involving millions rather than thousands of votes. Analysis of these broad currents is not intended to explain the hairline differences in popular vote, state by state, which edged the balance in favor of Kennedy rather than Nixon. But it can indicate quite clearly the broad forces which reduced the popular vote to a virtual stalemate, rather than any of the other reasonable outcomes between a 60-40 or a 40–60 vote division.
We extend the “fraud forensics” research to systematically explain precinct-level and regional variations in electoral manipulations in Russia’s March 2012 presidential election. Parametric last-digit frequency tests (a multivariate extension of last-digit tests) are employed to analyze fraud heterogeneity during the vote count stage. We also utilize author-assembled data harvested from the election monitoring non-governmental organization Golos’s regional reports of misconduct to explore the co-variance of last-digit fraud with other irregularities extending beyond the falsification of electoral records. We find that while higher regional education levels positively correlate with exposure of electoral malpractice, an educated populace may also incentivize regional officials to channel misconduct toward election-day fraud – perhaps because pre-electoral manipulations would be more visible to the public than tampering with ballots, and thus, more vulnerable to exposure. Furthermore, last-digit fraud is associated with (a) fake turnout counts; (b) fake votes disproportionally benefitting Putin; and (c) vote “re-distribution” whereby votes cast for some candidates are systematically miscounted. We also find that citizen reports of election-day misconduct are positively correlated with our region-specific last-digit fraud measures. The results indicate that reports by independent observers of sub-national electoral irregularities could be employed as reasonably reliable indicators of fraud, and could be utilized alongside other data to ascertain the incidence of misconduct in Russia and other settings.
In this paper, we argue that the occurrence of electoral manipulation in Russia has been driven, in part, by diffusion across neighboring raions through emulation, incentives, and networks. Presumably, in Putin’s Russia all local authorities have some incentives to deliver a high number of votes to United Russia, the “party of power”. However, the perceived pressure to deliver ever higher levels of support for Putin’s party arguably increases considerably if one’s raion is located in a region marked by extraordinarily high turnout and high vote share for United Russia. Conversely, the absence of perceived competition to curry executive favor through delivering votes and networks of uncorrupted local authorities, as well as local opposition organizations working to combat electoral fraud, may help explain the absence of fraud among raions located in regions marked by clean elections. Our quantitative analyses suggest that a “neighborhood effect” – the existence of manipulated raions within a region – strongly influences the likelihood that raions are manipulated. Moreover, although results are more mixed, spatial autocorrelation analysis suggests that turnout levels in raions are influenced by the turnout in proximate raions.
There was a consensus among professional Russia watchers that the rise of Dmitry Medvedev to the Russian presidency would bring no change and that the new president was a puppet completely controlled by his predecessor, current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This consensus is proving to be palpably incorrect, as predicted by the author of the article below. A "thaw" in Russia's domestic politics, economics and foreign policy has started. There has been significant liberalization in the style of Russian leadership. There also have been minor changes to the political system with the promise of more, major reforms of key institutions such as the MVD have been initiated, a fight against corruption has begun, and other rule-of-law initatives are being instituted. Likewise, a "reset" in Russian foreign policy is emerging to meet the Obama administration's own "reset" with Moscow.
Russia today represents one of the major examples of the phenomenon of “electoral authoritarianism” which is characterized by adopting the trappings of democratic institutions (such as elections, political parties, and a legislature) and enlisting the service of the country“s essentially authoritarian rulers. Why and how has the electoral authoritarian regime been consolidated in Russia? What are the mechanisms of its maintenance, and what is its likely future course? This book attempts to answer these basic questions. Vladimir Gel“man examines regime change in Russia from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the present day, systematically presenting theoretical and comparative perspectives of the factors that affected regime changes and the authoritarian drift of the country. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia“s national political elites aimed to achieve their goals by creating and enforcing of favorable “rules of the game” for themselves and maintaining informal winning coalitions of cliques around individual rulers. In the 1990s, these moves were only partially successful given the weakness of the Russian state and troubled post-socialist economy. In the 2000s, however, Vladimir Putin rescued the system thanks to the combination of economic growth and the revival of the state capacity he was able to implement by imposing a series of non-democratic reforms. In the 2010s, changing conditions in the country have presented new risks and challenges for the Putin regime that will play themselves out in the years to come.
From 1998 to 2005, six elections took place in postcommunist Europe that had the surprising outcome of empowering the opposition and defeating authoritarian incumbents or their designated successors. Velerie J. Bunce and Sharon L. Wolchik compare these unexpected electoral breakthroughs. They draw three conclusions. First, the opposition was victorious because of the hard and creative work of a transnational network composed of local opposition and civil society groups, members of the international democracy assistance community and graduates of successful electoral challenges to authoritarian rule in other countries. Second, the remarkable run of these upset elections reflected the ability of this network to diffuse an ensemble of innovative electoral strategies across state boundaries. Finally, elections can serve as a powerful mechanism for democratic change. This is especially the case when civil society is strong, the transfer of political power is through constitutional means, and opposition leaders win with small mandates.
Elections ought in theory to go a long way towards making democracy 'work', but in many contexts, they fail to embody democratic ideals because they are affected by electoral manipulation and misconduct. This volume undertakes an analytic and explanatory investigation of electoral malpractice, which is understood as taking three principal forms: manipulation of the rules governing elections, manipulation of vote preference formation and expression, and manipulation of the voting process. The study - which is comparative in nature - starts out by providing a conceptual definition and typology of electoral malpractice, before considering evidence for the causes of this phenomenon. The principal argument of the book is that factors affecting the costs of electoral malpractice are crucial in determining whether leaders will, in any given context, seek to rig elections. Among the most important factors of this sort are the linkages between elites and citizens, and in particular the balance between relations of the civil-society and clientelist types. These linkages play an important role in determining how much legitimacy leaders will lose by engaging in electoral manipulation, as well as the likely consequences of legitimacy loss. The study also shows how electoral malpractice might be reduced by means of a variety of strategies designed to raise the cost of electoral manipulation by increasing the ability of civil society and international actors to monitor and denounce it.
This volume offers a number of forensic indicators of election fraud applied to official election returns, and tests and illustrates their application in Russia and Ukraine. Included are the methodology's econometric details and theoretical assumptions. The applications to Russia include the analysis of all federal elections between 1996 and 2007 and, for Ukraine, between 2004 and 2007. Generally, we find that fraud has metastasized within the Russian polity during Putin's administration with upwards of 10 million or more suspect votes in both the 2004 and 2007 balloting, whereas in Ukraine, fraud has diminished considerably since the second round of its 2004 presidential election where between 1.5 and 3 million votes were falsified. The volume concludes with a consideration of data from the United States to illustrate the dangers of the application of our methods without due consideration of an election's substantive context and the characteristics of the data at hand. © Mikhail Myagkov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Dimitri Shakin 2009 and Cambridge University Press, 2010.
What is the impact of corruption on citizens' voting behavior? There is a growing literature on an increasingly ubiquitous puzzle in many democratic countries: that corrupt officials continue to be re-elected by voters. In this study we address this issue with a novel theory and newly collected original survey data for 24 European countries. The crux of the argument is that voters' ideology is a salient factor in explaining why citizens would continue voting for their preferred party despite the fact that it has been involved in a corruption scandal. Developing a theory of supply (number of effective parties) and demand (voters must have acceptable ideological alternatives to their preferred party), we posit that there is a U-shaped relationship between the likelihood of corruption voting and where voters place themselves on the left/right spectrum. The further to the fringes, the more likely the voters are to neglect corruption charges and continue to support their party. However, as the number of viable party alternatives increases, the effect of ideology is expected to play a smaller role. In systems with a large number of effective parties, the curve is expected to be flat, as the likelihood that the fringe voters also have a clean and reasonably ideologically close alternative to switch to. The hypothesis implies a cross level interaction for which we find strong and robust empirical evidence using hierarchical modeling. In addition, we provide empirical insights about how individual level ideology and country level party systems - among other factors - impact a voter's decision to switch parties or stay home in the face of their party being involved in a corruption scandal.
Despite extensive research on electoral turnout in developed democracies, we know relatively little about the determinants of electoral participation in (electoral) autocracies. Yet, electoral mobilization is crucial to understanding electoral authoritarian regime dynamics and democratic regression. This article studies the ‘socioeconomic roots’ of electoral authoritarianism by using original local-level data from a prominent contemporary electoral authoritarian regime, Russia. The article shows how the electoral mobilization of certain institutionally and socioeconomically state-dependent demographic sectors was a key part in Russia’s transition from a competitive to hegemonic authoritarian regime between 2000 and 2004. An original local-level data set allows us to test the hypotheses using multilevel models, controlling for several socioeconomic and contextual variables at both regional and local levels. The results support the hypotheses of electoral mobilization in specific demographic areas and show interesting variations in turnout patterns between the subnational units.
While much of the literature on voter turnout focuses on institutional and socioeconomic factors related to the 'input' side of the political process, we examine the 'output' side, and advance this field of research by studying the impact of corruption perceptions on turnout in the most recent national legislative elections across 170 European regions. Using data from a novel measure of regional perceived corruption of government services and the electoral process, together with several control variables, we find through multilevel modeling that regional quality of government positively impacts regional turnout. In more detail, our results indicate that citizens' perceptions of corruption make them, in the aggregate, less likely to cast a ballot.
Does economic adversity affect whether people vote? Data from the November 1974 Current Population Survey are used to estimate the effect that unemployment, poverty, and a decline in financial well-being have on voter turnout. Each economic problem suppresses participation. These individual level findings are corroborated with aggregate time-series data from presidential and midterm elections since 1896. When a person suffers economic adversity his scarce resources are spent holding body and soul together, not on remote concerns like politics. Economic problems both increase the opportunity costs of political participation and reduce a person's capacity to attend to politics.
This paper studies the impact of corruption victimization on anti-government protest. It is argued that two features of corruption victimization are relevant for understanding its impact: its intensity level and the clarity of responsibility of the ruling government. Drawing upon survey data from the 2004 Bolivia Democracy Audit, the paper finds that low levels of exposure to corruption generally do not induce a greater inclination to participate in anti-government protest behavior than no exposure at all, whereas high levels of exposure do exert a positive and substantively large impact on protest. Moreover, the paper shows that the institutional affiliations of the perpetrators of corruption are crucially important in understanding how citizens react to their victimization. When perpetrators are linked to the ruling government through patronage networks (i.e., clarity of responsibility is high), victimization is much more likely to produce anti-government protest than when no such link is present.
Retrospective voting models assume that offering more information to voters about their incumbents' performance strengthens electoral accountability. However, it is unclear whether incumbent corruption information translates into higher political participation and increased support for challengers. We provide experimental evidence that such information not only decreases incumbent party support in local elections in Mexico, but also decreases voter turnout and support for the challenger party, as well as erodes partisan attachments. While information clearly is necessary to improve accountability, corruption information is not sufficient because voters may respond to it by withdrawing from the political process. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for studies of voting behavior.
Scholars have consistently demonstrated that no link exists between declining political trust and declining turnout, but they have paid less attention to the effect of trust on vote choice. In an era characterized by declining trust, the incumbent party has lost, and third parties have strongly contested, four of the last eight presidential elections. Such outcomes are historically anomalous. This study demonstrates that declining political trust affects vote choice, but the electoral beneficiary differs according to electoral context. In two-candidate races, politically distrustful voters support candidates from the nonincumbent major party. In races with three viable candidates, third-party alternatives benefit from declining political trust at the expense of both major parties.
How does corruption affect voting behavior when economic conditions are poor? Using a novel experimental design and two original survey experiments, we offer four important conclusions. First, in a low corruption country (Sweden), voters react negatively to corruption regardless of the state of the economy. Second, in a high corruption country (Moldova), voters react negatively to corruption only when the state of the economy is also poor; when economic conditions are good, corruption is less important. Third, respondents in Sweden react more strongly to corruption stimuli than respondents in Moldova. Finally, in the low corruption country, sociotropic corruption voting (or voting based on corruption among political leaders) is relatively more important, whereas in our high corruption country, pocketbook corruption voting (or voting based on one's own personal experience with corruption, i.e., being asked to pay bribes) is equally prevalent. Our findings are consistent with multiple stable corruption equilibria, as well as with a world where voters are more responsive to corruption signals more common in their environment.
Despite the tumult associated with the national elections of 2011 and 2012, Putin's regime retains broad and deep connections with the electorate, but ominous signs of erosion portend bigger problems despite the coercive force and other resources at the authorities' disposal.
The judicial reform has made bribery more widespread in the Russian courts, with business people the main target of extortion.
The findings of a special study confirm that as an informal practice, bribery in government and budget-funded organizations draws support from a system of norms and values that is deeply rooted in Russian society.
Reelection of corrupted politicians points to a problem of democratic accountability. Voters do have the chance to ‘throw the rascals out’, but they do not take it. Employing a survey experiment, we test two popular explanations of why Greek voters fail to effectively sanction corrupt politicians. One is related to the distorting effects of psychological attachment to parties and the second to tradeoffs that seem to come into play when voters weigh the prevalence of corruption against other tangible benefits that they receive from governments and parties, such as lower taxes or clientelistic exchanges. Our findings suggest that collective benefits, such as cutting taxes, outweigh the costs of tolerating political corruption. On the contrary, exclusive provision of goods to specific voters, such as in the case of clientelistic exchanges, seems to be negatively related to support for a corrupt politician and therefore should rather not be regarded as a source of tolerance to corruption, at least not in present time Greece.