We study incumbency effects for individual legislators from two political parties (Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party) in Italy’s lower house of representatives over ten legislatures (1948–1992). Results of a regression discontinuity design adapted to multimember...

Standard cross-national measures of corruption are assembled through surveys. We propose a novel alternative objective measure that consists of the difference between a measure of the physical quantities of public infrastructure and the cumulative price government pays for public capital stocks....

Utilizing new data on criminal charges against candidates to India's Fourteenth and Fifteenth Lok Sabha elections, we study the conditions that resulted in approximately a quarter of those elected to each legislature facing or having previously faced criminal charges. We show that Indian...

We review a decade of literature on clientelism, a central topic in the study of developing democracies. We define clientelism as the discretionary distribution of public resources by politicians. We distinguish clientelism that occurs in the pre-electoral period (electoral clientelism) from...

Utilizing data from the power corporation of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, we study the politics of electricity theft over a ten year period (2000-09). Our preliminary results are that electricity theft is substantial in magnitude but that the extent of theft varies with the...

Utilizing a new dataset that reports criminal charges against candidates to India's Fourteenth Lok Sabha in the 2004 national legislative elections, we study the conditions that resulted in nearly a quarter of those elected facing or having previously faced criminal charges. We show that Indian...