Sex, Money, and Votes: Varieties of Corrupt Exchanges and Their Determinants

• In Event: Perspectives on Gender and Identity

Abstract

The comparative politics literature on malfeasance offers various typologies of corrupt acts, most often classified by the level of public officials involved and by the area in which the public interest is hurt. Even with scholarship on corruption quickly mushrooming, less is known about how the nature of payment shapes such interactions. Bribery defined in monetary terms is the category receiving a significant attention to the extent that it is frequently used as a synonym for corruption in general. The least studied category is sexual bribing or sextortion about which we know little to nothing. This paper studies three types of corrupt payments – using money and sex to obtain services and offering money to “buy” votes. In the former two, public officials are paid to provide service for citizens preferentially, in the latter – voters receive a payment to cast a ballot that would help a politician get elected. Results from recent survey research shows a considerable cross-national variation in the practices of these forms of misuse of public/political power. I seek answers to two research questions: 1) are bribery, sextortion, and vote buying associated phenomena, and 2) what contextual circumstances favor a specific type of corrupt payment?

There are only a few studies that have investigated sextortion in comparison to bribery and their results, while pioneering, call for further conceptualization and careful analysis. My approach challenges findings in this previous research by advancing a new theoretical framework and relying on different analytical tools. Theoretically, the paper draws upon four main schools of thought to hypothesize that cross-national variation in the rates of bribery, sextortion, and vote buying can each be explained through a different sub-set of economic, cultural, institutional, and political variables. The regression analysis uses data from Global Corruption Barometer, V-Democracy, and World Development Indicators of the World Bank. Countries from three world regions are included – Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Author

• Tatiana Kostadinova, Florida International University