Do voters punish corrupt mayors?: recent evidence from Spain

• Autores: Elena Costas-Pérez, Albert Solé Ollé, Pilar Sorribas Navarro
• Localización: XVII Encuentro de Economía Pública: políticas públicas ante la crisis, 2010, pág. 73
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The aim of this paper is to analyze the effects of corruption in electoral outcomes with Spanish data.

    Based upon press reports published between 2000 and 2007 we are able to construct a novel database on corruption related to the land-use regulation. With this data we estimate a vote share equation by OLS and IV. Several studies from the literature on corruption and accountability have not taken into account the possible endogeneity of corruption data, which biases the OLS coefficient to zero.

    Using an appropriate methodology our results suggest that corrupt politicians are more penalized by the voters than is usually belived. Considering all the corruption cases that have taken place in Spain we can estimate the loss of votes between 9.7% and 11%, depending on who is punished, all the parties in the government or only the mayor�s party.