Responsiveness to Corruption: Evidence from U.S. Local Governments

• In Event: Public Opinion, Policy, and Local Politics

Abstract

This paper traces the linkages between local government corruption, media coverage, and political trust in the United States. We present a new dataset on local government corruption which contains case-level geographic and career information about government officials implicated in corrupt practices. We then describe the conditions under which corruption prosecutions lead to local media coverage. Finally, we use granular data on public opinion about local governments to measure the responsiveness of citizen approval to actual and reported corruption. We find that surprisingly few corruption cases are subject to significant media coverage, even when those cases result in prosecution in federal courts. Supply of local newspapers is an important limitation on coverage. However, public opinion is at least somewhat responsive to variation in corruption. These results provide important descriptive context and initial explanatory findings on the understudied area of local government corruption in the United States.

Author

• Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, Stanford University