Date:
Location:
Today's Speaker
Natalia Garbiras-Díaz (Harvard Business School), "Corruption and the Rise of Political Outsiders: Evidence from Audits and Local Elections in Brazil"
Abstract
How does corruption salience influence the entry of political outsiders? While revelations about corruption are known to shape citizens’ votes, it is unclear whether outsiders take advantage of corruption scandals to contest elections. I argue that corruption is a valence issue that allows outsider candidates to draw support from disaffected voters across the ideological spectrum. To test this theory, first, I construct a novel measure of candidates' use of anti-corruption rhetoric using manifestos registered by over forty-nine thousand mayoral candidates in Brazil who ran for election between 2012 and 2020. These data reveal that outsiders, especially those who adopt more centrist positions, are more likely to resort to this valence appeal. Second, I use random annual audits conducted by the federal government as a source of exogenous variation in corruption revelations in Brazilian mayoral accounts and show that municipalities exposed to these shocks experience a greater entry of outsider candidates. However, outsiders do not obtain better electoral results. The evidence suggests that this may be due to mainstream candidates adjusting their campaign strategies in response to outsider entry. In particular, I find that non-outsiders, when exposed to this shock, mimic outsiders by adopting their anti-corruption rhetoric. This paper demonstrates how an increase in the salience of corruption can spur the emergence of outsiders and highlights consequential and understudied indirect effects of corruption on the persistence of democracy.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Alberto Alesina Seminar on Political Economy supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
Zoom links for the Alesina Seminar are distributed via the seminar's mailing list. You can subscribe to the Alesina Seminar Mailing List here.
See the seminar's full schedule at the Alesina Seminar page.
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.