This paper shows that the body of appointed officials that a new democracy inherits from the previous regime is a key determinant of the extent of electoral fraud and clientelistic spending in new democracies. I develop a model that predicts that appointed officials have stronger incentives to...

We show that political institutions affect corruption levels. We use audit reports in Brazil to construct new measures of political corruption in local governments and test whether electoral accountability affects the corruption practices of incumbent politicians. We find significantly less...