Voter Heterogeneity and Political Corruption

Enriqueta Aragonès, Javier Rivas and Áron Tóth

No 1121, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: We show that policies that eliminate corruption can depart from socially desirable policies and this inefficiency can be large enough to allow corruption to live on. Political competition between an honest (welfare maximiser) and corrupt politicians is studied. In our model the corrupt politician is at a distinct disadvantage: there is no asymmetric information, no voter bias and voters are fully rational. Yet, corruption cannot be eliminated when voters have heterogeneous preferences. Moreover, the corrupt politician can win the majority, as the honest politician tries to trade off the cost of eliminating corruption with its benefits.

Keywords: political corruption; political competition; voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ore and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.barcelonagse.eu/sites/default/files/working_paper_pdfs/1121.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1121

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().