Power-sharing in governments, clarity of responsibility, and the control of corruption

ABSTRACT

How does power-sharing in governments influence the control of corruption in Asia Pacific democracies? Studies find that voters can more easily hold elected officials accountable, providing them with incentives to control corruption, if levels of clarity of responsibility are sufficiently high. Most of these studies have focused on European countries, and have tended to measure power-sharing, which lowers clarity of responsibility, in terms of coalition governments. The wide variation in institutional arrangements across the democracies in the Asia Pacific region calls for a more nuanced evaluation of the conditions under which we should expect to find clarity of responsibility. Using original data on government characteristics in 19 Asia Pacific democracies from 1996 to 2019 and data on control of corruption from the World Bank, I find that higher levels of clarity of responsibility, captured by presidentialism and a higher share of decision-making power held by the head of government’s party, promote higher levels of corruption control.

KEYWORDS:

• accountability
• clarity of responsibility
• corruption
• power-sharing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In presidential democracies, the legislature cannot remove the president or the cabinet with a vote of no confidence. In parliamentary democracies, the prime minister and the rest of the cabinet can be removed any time a majority in the legislature wants to do so. Both parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies have a vote of no confidence procedure, and “parliamentary” will be used to refer to both. (They can be distinguished by the mode of selection of the head of state; in a semi-presidential regime the head of state is popularly elected while in a parliamentary regime they are not.) See Table A1 in the Appendix for more information, including how each country in the dataset is classified.

2. The UN stats webpage offers the information on this criterion (See https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/).

3. The information on democratic years of the Asia Pacific countries in the sample is available in Table A1 in the Appendix.

4. For more information, including sources used to create the variable, see https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/

5. For more information on the aggregation methodology, see https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/Home/Documents

6. For example, if a coalition government was in office from January 1 to October 31 and government B, a single party, was in office the rest of the year, then the weighted average is 0.83*1 + 0.17*0 = 0.83. This score tells us that a country was governed by a coalition government for most of that year.

7. Note that in Wahman et al.’s dataset, British settler colonies, such as Australia, are not defined as countries with British colonial heritage. However, following Treisman (2000), I define them as countries with British colonial origin, because the legal culture of these countries, based on British common law systems, is clearly influenced by British colonial heritage.

8. Descriptive statistics are provided in Table A2 in the Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jinhyuk Jang

Jinhyuk Jang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on executive-legislative relations, with a special emphasis on government formation in Asian-Pacific democracies.