Abstract
Since 1978, an important process of decentralization in terms of regional competences has been taking place in Spain. In consequence, the behaviour of the regional and local administration has obtained an increasing relevant role. This process has a direct impact on the performance of politicians both at local and regional level, and on the results of elections. Recent data on elections show that national parties have lost the voting race at local elections. Moreover, at the same time as the economic boom in this country in the 2000s, there was also a boom in political corruption at the local level. Using a database that includes municipal data from 2004 to 2011 in Spain, this paper evaluates whether national parties lose votes at national elections due to the wrongdoing of their local candidates. Moreover, we focus on partisan effects, splitting the analysis according to the two main political parties in Spain. Our study resembles an experimental design, which yields two main conclusions. First, local corruption affects significantly the parties’ votes at national level, being the magnitude of the effect around one percentage point in absolute values. Second and interestingly, the sign of the results also depends on whether the corruption is on the right or the left wing.
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Notes
See Pellegrini [23] for an extensive discussion of what corruption means. This author presents a formal definition of this term as follows: “Corruption is the misuse of entrusted power for private gain; it is behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a given role because of private-regarding (personal, close family, private clique) pecuniary or status gains; or violate rules against the exercise of certain types of private regarding influence. This includes such behavior as bribery (use of a reward to pervert the judgment of a person in a position of trust); nepotism (bestowal of patronage by reason of ascriptive relationship rather than merit); and misappropriation (illegal appropriation of public resources for private-regarding uses)”. See Pellegrini [23], Chapter 2, page 17. This definition improves ones by Nye [22].
Nowadays it exists four levels of Government: Central, Regional, Provincial and Local one. Each level has some competences on public expenditures and revenues. For example, while central tax revenue reached 94.7% of total public revenue in 1978 (local tax revenue was 5.3%), the percentage of distribution in 2010 was 72.6%, 18.2% and 9.1% for central, regional and local levels respectively. Source: OECD Fiscal decentralization database.
Moreover, this decrease of faith or trust in institutions has been considered traditionally an explicative factor of the growing social conflicts, of the existence of distortions in the economic system, and even of the failure of democratic systems [27].
See Sanz [28] for an exposition on the three families of relevant explanations for split-ticket voting.
A Brazilian aforism resumes this question: rouba mais faz.
See Piattoni [24] for a revision on this topic.
See Anduiza et al. [2].
However, we have to take into account that this author analyses only simultaneous voting, which does not occur in the voting we have considered in this study.
This was USD 13,836,70 in 1999 and reached USD 16,351,11 in 2007 (in constant dollars of 2000). Source: World Bank Database.
We have considered the effect on the vote of corruption, regardless of whether the party analyze show the absolute majority in the municipality considered.
This allows us to pick up the effect of other external shocks that may explain the vote shares of the parties such as the terrorist attack that took place in March 2004, right before the elections.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge comments and suggestions by Joaquín Artés, Yolanda Pérez and an anonymous referee. However, all errors are ours. Juan Luis Jiménez also thanks the ACIISI Research Program (PROID20100209) for providing funding.
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Appendix: Description of the variables
Appendix: Description of the variables
-
(i)
Share-PPit: this endogenous variable represents the share of votes of the main right-wing party (PP) in the municipality i at national elections in year t. We also use the share data for previous national elections (four years before) as a lagged variable for its explanatory power. This lagged variable allows us to control for historical voting behaviour in each municipality. Jiménez and García [17] or Costas-Pérez et al. [9] also use this lagged covariate.
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(ii)
Change Share-PPit: change between two local elections in the share of votes of the main right-wing party (PP) in the municipality i at national elections in year t, respect to previous national elections. This variable will be an endogenous one in the Difference-in-differences estimator we explain in the following section, as Costas-Pérez et al. [9] do.
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(iii)
Share-PSOEit: this endogenous variable represents the share of votes of the main left-wing party (PSOE) in the municipality i at national elections in year t. We also use the share data for previous national elections (four years before) as a lagged variable for its explanatory power. We include it for the reasons mentioned above.
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(iv)
iv) Change Share-PSOEit: change between two local elections in the share of votes of the main left-wing party (PSOE) in the municipality i at national elections in year t, respect to previous national elections.
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(v)
Corruptionbefore2004it: this is a binary variable that takes the value 1 if the case of local corruption in the municipality i was brought before 2004 and 0 in all other cases. As our main aim is to detect partisan behaviour, we consider separately local corruption by PP or PSOE, i.e., it is 1 if a case of local corruption of PP has occurred in the municipality i in this period. This explanation affects two following covariates.
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(vi)
Corruptionperiod2004–08it: this is a binary variable that takes the value 1 if the case of local corruption in the municipality i was brought between 2004 and 2008 and 0 if brought in the years t prior to 2004.
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(vii)
Corruptionperiod2008–11it: this binary variable takes the value 1 if the case of local corruption in the municipality i was brought between 2008 and 2011 and 0 in the years t prior to 2008.
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(viii)
Local corruptioni: this is binary variable that takes value 1 if the municipality i had a case of local corruption in any of the years analysed, and 0 otherwise.
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(ix)
Provincial corruptionit: this is a binary variable that takes value 1 if there was a case of provincial corruption in year t in the province to which the municipality i belongs, and 0 otherwise.
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(x)
Regional corruptionit: this is a binary variable that takes value 1 if there was a case of regional corruption in year t in the region to which the municipality i belongs, and 0 otherwise.
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(xi)
Density of population(lagged)it-1: this is the density of population of the municipality i at year t but lagged one year to show the year before elections. Source: La Caixa municipal database.
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(xii)
Local property tax (IBI)it: this variable refers to the taxable income of the local property tax in each municipality for every year of the database. We include it to capture the degree of urban development and its value, as state Fernández-Vázquez and Rivero [12]. Source: Ministerio de Hacienda y Administraciones Públicas.
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(xiii)
% of people above 65 years oldit: this covariate is the percentage of the total population in the municipality i at year t who are elderly. We include it to control for potential different vote or partisan behaviour among municipalities.
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(xiv)
Bi-annual rate of populationit: this variable is the average of two different growth rates, i) the annual variation of population from year t-1 to year t, and ii) the annual variation of population from year t-2 to t-1, for every municipality i. Costas-Pérez et al. [9] also use it, but they use four-years lagged growth rate.
-
(xv)
Gross domestic product per capitait: this comprises GDP per capita at current prices for every autonomous community in the corresponding year. It has been included to control for potential income effects on vote. Source: Spanish Statistical Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estadística).
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(xvi)
Yeari: this is a variable indicating the year; we include it to control for time effects in the data pool.
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(xvii)
Provincei: this is a dummy variable for municipality i in each Province in Spain which controls for potential fixed effects. This is an important variable in Spain due to the fact that, in some Autonomous Communities, national subjective identity has been a key element in the configuration of a particular electoral arena in which parties have to structure the demands and aspirations of regional autonomy [26].
