Corruption, Bureaucracy, and Policymaking

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Both public service delivery and democratic representation suffer when bureaucrats and elected officials put their own personal interests above those of the general population. This panel brings together four papers on four different political contexts, spanning developed and developing countries, as well as autocracies and democracies, to shed new light on both the conditions under which corruption thrives, and the steps that governments can take to combat it. Brierley and Poertner’s paper implements a novel field experiment to test the conditions under which voters put their support behind anti-corruption agendas. Interestingly, opposition parties must play a central role in promoting these initiatives for them to gain widespread support. This finding sparks a nice conversation with Szakonyi’s paper, which brings to bear new data on financial disclosures at the municipal level in Russia to show how even in autocracies, opposition parties can help decrease corruption from within the bureaucracies. And a novel survey experiment shows that voters appear to reward them for doing so. Guerrero, Harding and Ruiz adopt a similar follow-the-money approach to track how political spending ramps up when climate-related natural disasters cause spikes in bureaucratic expenditures. Finally, Heo and Wirsching derive a new theoretical framework for understanding when and why bureaucrats sabotage well-intentioned reforms when they conflict with their personal interests. Taken together, these papers apply a rich set of mixed methods -- including a field experiment, original surveys with embedded experiments, extensive administrative data, semi-structured interviews, and a formal model -- to uncover new, complex relationships between politicians, bureaucrats, and voters.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Chair

• David Szakonyi George Washington University

Discussants

• Kyuwon Lee University of Southern California

• Lucia Motolinia Washington University in St Louis

Individual Presentations

• Cross-Party Anti-corruption Platforms and Voter Beliefs - Sarah Brierley, London School of Economics; Mathias Poertner, London School of Economics and Political Science

• The Larger the Bounty, the Larger the Investment: Climate Events and Donations - Laura Guerrero; Robin Harding, University of Oxford; Nelson Alejandro Ruiz, University of Essex

• Opposition Rule: Controlling Corruption under Autocracy - David Szakonyi, George Washington University

• Bureaucratic Sabotage and Policy Inefficiency - Byeonggeun Kun Heo, New York University; Elisa Maria Wirsching, Princeton University