Corruption Voting and Political Context: Testing the Micro Mechanisms

Abstract

The electoral consequences of individual perceptions of corruption are an important component of political accountability. In this paper I am concerned with what drives variation in corruption voting across countries. While the accountability through elections mechanism is frequently assumed as a force that connects party system and levels of corruption, this mechanism is rarely tested at the individual level. I argue here, and findings suggest that it is so, that features of the party system related to clarity of responsibility in terms of policy outputs and stable system features such as plurality electoral rules might prime corruption as an issue in voting calculations. I test these expectations with individual level survey data from Module 2 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems.