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...

This paper analyzes the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country's 92 provinces between 1953 and 1994. Extending implications of theories of legislative behavior to the context of open-list proportional representation, we...

We use a randomized saturation design to investigate whether domestic election observers reduce electoral fraud in the 2012 presidential elections in Ghana. Results show that observers reduce the probability of overvoting (more votes cast than registered voters) at observed stations by 60...

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...

The eight countries examined in this study--Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden--have long been viewed as exemplifying "corporatist" industrial relations systems, in which union coverage is high, unions are influential and commonly have strong ties to...

We analyze the relationship between electoral systems and corruption in a large sample of contemporary democratic nations. Whereas previous studies have shown that closed-list proportional representation is associated with greater (perceived) corruption than open-list PR, we demonstrate that...

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....

We study the determinants of corruption in a sample of 40-odd authoritarian polities at the turn of the 21st century. Recent studies have proposed several parallel mechanisms potentially relevant for variations in the extent of corruption in authoritarian regimes. We put these various theories...

We seek to investigate the determinants of corruption in authoritarian polities. We hypothesize that corruption in nondemocratic settings will be greater where the ruling group is personalistic rather than a political party or a military clique and that it will be greater where rulers expect to...