Enrique Seira
Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow
Joe and Deborah Loughrey Professor of Economics
We complement a field experiment with cross-country evidence to show that exposure to apex corruption— corrupt acts implicating top-level politicians—causes large decreases in democratic values and associated behaviors. Behaviors such as individual voter turnout, contributions to support elections, and honesty and trust in incentivized games all fall. The effects on voting are greatest for incumbents perceived to be honest when apex corruption is exposed close to elections. We show, both experimentally and across scandals in 17 national settings, that apex corruption also reduces explicit support for democracy in favor of authoritarianism. We test two restorative solutions.
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Sponsored by the Kellogg Institute at the Keough School of Global Affairs.