Political Polarization as a Constraint on Corruption: A Cross-National Comparison
In this paper the authors take a novel approach to understanding political corruption. They use panel data from a broad range of countries to support the theory that ideological polarisation can be used as a predictor of the perceived level of corruption within a country. Moreover, they claim that political polarisation itself can act as a constraint on corruption.
Past research on corruption has focused on specific features of political institutions, such as electoral rules, electoral systems, electoral districts, or forms of government, to name a few. However, “scholars generally ignore who is engaged in political struggle.” In other words, the research has been too focused on the institutional rules while neglecting who occupies these institutions.
This paper aims to fill this gap. It finds that when the institutions are controlled by polarised political interests, the level of perceived corruption goes down. This supports past work by Alt and Lassen who suggested that corruption can be controlled by an opposition so long as the opposition is given an institutional role.
The results have two main policy implications. First, the paper finds that designing policies that reduce corruption may not very effective in countries where there are no ideological checks on powerful interests in government. Second, designing institutions that are actually controlled by ideological polarised interests can lower perceived corruption. The paper ends with a suggestion that further research should be conducted on how and why polarisation is achieved.
Citation: D. S. Brown et al., “Political Polarization as a Constraint on Corruption: A Cross-national Comparison”. World Development, 39(9): 1516-1529, 2011
Note: the URL provided below is to the author's open-source version. As noted in that version, there may be differences when compared to the published edition.
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