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Who Is Punishing Corrupt Politicians - Voters or the Central Government? Evidence from the Brazilian Anti-Corruption Program
TLDR
In this article, the authors exploited the exogenous variation in the timing of the release of the audit reports and the Brazilian institutional scheme to shed light on the mechanisms through which the Brazilian anti-corruption program functions.Abstract:
In 2003 the Brazilian central government (CG) launched an anti-corruption program. Since then municipalities have been randomly selected to be audited on a monthly basis. Evidence in the literature suggests that the probability of re-election of an incumbent mayor decreases as the number of reported corruption violations rises before the municipal elections. By exploiting the exogenous variation in the timing of the release of the audit reports and the Brazilian institutional scheme, this paper sheds light on the mechanisms through which the Brazilian anti-corruption program functions. After the release of the audit reports, municipalities where more than two corruption violations were reported receive 26% fewer transfers from the CG. Total expenditure on infrastructure is also reduced. While the CG increases the amount of transfers to municipalities where the mayor is both aliated with the partys president and found to be honest, it helps politically aligned municipalities with high levels of released corruption to move through the punishment process more quickly. The eects of the dissemination of corruption information on the probability of re-election of incumbent mayors seem to gradually disappear with time. Yet, when these eects haveread more
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Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?
Ghazala Mansuri,Vijayendra Rao +1 more
TL;DR: The authors in this article argue that participatory development is most effective when it works within a "sandwich" formed by support from an effective central state and bottom-up civic action.
The journal of political economy
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore a hypothesis, based on acIcumulating evidence, regarding the character of inventions likely to issue from the research laboratories of the large industrial corporations.
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The Political Resource Curse
TL;DR: In this article, the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians was studied with theory and data in Brazil, where federal transfers to municipal governments change exogenously at given population thresholds, allowing them to implement a regression discontinuity design.
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Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil
TL;DR: In this article, the authors apply a regression discontinuity design in close elections to identify the effect of political alignment on federal transfers to municipal governments in Brazil and find that municipalities where the mayor is affiliated with the coalition of the Brazilian President receive larger (discretionary) infrastructure transfers by about 40% in pre-election years.
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Tying Your Enemy's Hands in Close Races: The Politics of Federal Transfers in Brazil
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used regression discontinuity design in close electoral races to disclose purely political reasons in the allocation of intergovernmental transfers in a federal state, and found that municipalities in which the mayor is affiliated with the coalition (and especially with the political party) of the Brazilian president receive approximately one-third larger discretionary transfers for infrastructures.
References
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Political Economics: Explaining Economic Policy
Torsten Persson,Guido Tabellini +1 more
TL;DR: The authors combine the best of macroeconomic policy, public choice, and rational choice in political science, and propose a unified approach to the field of political economics, and identify the main outstanding problems.
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Local Capture: Evidence from a Central Government Transfer Program in Uganda
Ritva Reinikka,Jakob Svensson +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors assess the extent to which the grant actually reached the intended end-user (schools) using panel data from a unique survey of primary schools, and find that schools in better-off communities managed to claim a higher share of their entitlements.
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Exposing Corrupt Politicians: The Effects of Brazil's Publicly Released Audits on Electoral Outcomes
Claudio Ferraz,Frederico Finan +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the effect of the disclosure of local government corruption practices upon the re-election success of incumbent mayors in municipal elections and found that disclosure of audit results had a significant impact on the reelection rates of mayors found to be corrupt.
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Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a randomized field experiment on reducing corruption in over 600 Indonesian village road projects, finding that increasing government audits from 4 percent of projects to 100 percent reduced missing expenditures, as measured by discrepancies between official project costs and an independent engineers' estimate of costs.
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Accountability and decentralisation in government: An incomplete contracts model
TL;DR: In this article, the question of the appropriate level of decentralisation of power in government is addressed as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts, and the model of the paper compares allocations of power to local, central and regional government as alternative means of motivating governments to act in the interests of citizens.
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