The Manipulation of Mass Elections: Corruption, Expectations and Turnout.

Although nowadays a large number of regimes are formally democratic, democracy doesn?t work equally well in every place. Often, those groups who wielded power under the old authoritarian regime manage to continue wielding it under democracy, thus bypassing democratic mechanisms for government responsiveness. This paper focuses on one of the most common tactics used to subvert democratic contestation, namely electoral corruption. Electoral corruption is a common phenomenon and it can have decisive consequences in the outcome of elections, yet we don?t currently have a clear theoretical account of its workings. The standard view, implicit in most of the existing literature, is that electoral corruption makes most sense in close elections, when altering the vote count at the margin is most likely to change the outcome. While this view is adequate in some cases, it nevertheless fails to account for some of the main stylized facts about electoral corruption. For one thing, corruption is common even when elections aren?t close. Second, while the literature argues that perpetrators of electoral corruption should try to keep it secret, it is often surprisingly public. I develop a simple theory of electoral corruption that challenges the standard view. I pay special attention to the role that expectations play on the behavior of voters, a critical issue that the standard view largely ignores. Using simple models I show that under certain conditions that are particularly relevant to developing countries, a powerful ruler or ruling group may have incentives to engage in more electoral corruption than merely winning would require, to engage in such actions not only during and after the election but also before it, and to publicize rather than hide its corrupt activities. These findings may at first seem counterintuitive, yet they square well with both historical and survey evidence for a variety of countries and time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]