Responsibility attribution for corruption scandals

ABSTRACT

This paper studies the effect of the type of government on responsibility attribution for corruption scandals. Most studies on corruption voting have assumed that voters punish all kinds of governments. This article challenges this assumption by distinguishing between two types of governments: single-party majority governments and minority/coalition governments. This hypothesis is tested using data from the 2011 Spanish local elections. Our findings reveal that the effect of coalition governments on corruption voting is not statistically different than majority ones. However, when we differentiate between welfare-enhancing and welfare decreasing corruption, we find that welfare-decreasing corruption has a clear negative effect on the electoral performance of the mayor’s party when it impacts single-party majority governments, but not when the mayor needs the support of other parties (minority or coalition governments).

KEYWORDS:

• Corruption
• coalition governments
• elections
• accountability
• clarity of responsibility

Acknowledgement

I am extremely grateful to Albert Falcó Gimeno and the three anonymous Local Government Studies referees for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A problem could arise when a criterion of distinction is so narrow that cases where some form of corruption actually exists are, nevertheless, coded as ‘No corruption’. According to Fernández-Vázquez, Barberá, and Rivero (2016), however, this factor is not problematic since the control group is large enough that, even though these cases exist, their effect on the total number of cases would be imperceptible. In addition, even if their effect could be minimally perceptible, it would result in an underestimation of the status effect.

2. We considered running regressions to test whether there are any differences when considering minority and coalition governments as two distinct groups. However, this was not feasible because of the very small number of scandals affecting minority governments (just two).

3. PP and PSOE are very different parties when it comes to agreeing on possible local coalition governments. In the observed period PP held 2,972 mayoralties, of wich 2,705 were single-party majority governments and 271 minority/coalition government. On the other hand, PSOE held 2,486 mayoralties. Of these, 2,051 were single-party majority governments and 435 minority/coalition governments. For this reason, regressions have also been repeated, but only by selecting the municipalities whose mayor belonged to PP, on the one hand, and the municipalities whose mayor belonged to the PSOE, on the other. The results do not show any significant change.

4. We have introduced the unemployment rate because GDP data are not available at the Spanish local level for the period 2007-2011. The data were obtained from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (Spanish National Statistics Institute). It should be noted that we used the total population aged between 16 and 64 as a divisor as there were no specific data available for the ‘labor force’ group.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the research grant CSO2013-42262-P.

Notes on contributors

Sergi Ferrer

Sergi Ferrer is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science, Constitutional Law and Philosophy of Law at the University of Barcelona. His principal research interests are comparative politics, electoral behavior and coalition politics.