Electoral Rules and Constitutional Structures as Constraints on Corruption

Abstract

Elections serve two functions in representative democracies. First, they select political actors who enact public policies in the light of constituents’ preferences. Second, they permit citizens to hold their representatives accountable and to punish them if they enrich themselves in corrupt or self-serving ways. In other words, elections provide both incentives for politicians to enact certain kinds of policies and constraints on politicians’ malfeasance. In this chapter, we focus on the second of these two functions and investigate how different electoral systems constrain corrupt rent-seeking, holding constant other political, economic and social factors.

This chapter is a shortened version of Kunicová and Rose-Ackerman (2005). Readers are referred to that paper for more extensive citations to the literature and more details on the results reported here.