Do Voters Benchmark? Corruption Accountability Across Regional Borders

• In Event: Elections, Voting and Campaigning

Abstract

Do voters use benchmarks when they make up their mind on whether to reward or punish incumbents for (non) corrupt activity. While a host of different conditions and barriers to corruption accountability have been proposed in the literature, benchmarking remains a hitherto unexplored link. We take advantage here of the multilevel structure of the European Quality of Government (EQI) survey over several rounds that contains perceptions on various indicators of quality of government at the sub-national level within all 27 EU member countries. Our results reveal a bench-marking effect in the sense that corruption-voting seems to be conditioned by a region’s relative corruption score, vis a vis the national average. More specifically, voters in regions that are over-performers with respect to ‘quality of government’ (QoG) seem to weigh corruption more heavily in their voting decisions against incumbents. Conversely, citizens living in relatively lower QOG regions are less likely to hold corrupt incumbents accountable. The paper presents a novel theoretical model to explain these patterns.

Authors

• Nicholas Charron, University of Gothenburg

• Georgios Xezonakis, University of Gothenburg