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Social Choice and Welfare

Erschienen in:

01.03.2014 | Original Paper

Corruption and power in democracies

verfasst von: Francesco Giovannoni, Daniel J. Seidmann

Erschienen in: Social Choice and Welfare | Ausgabe 3/2014

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Abstract

We study the implications of Acton’s dictum that power corrupts when citizens vote (for three parties) and governments then form in a series of elections. In each election, parties have fixed tastes for graft, which affect negotiations to form a government if parliament hangs; but incumbency changes tastes across elections. Our model entails various plausible predictions about long-run patterns of government. Acton’s dictum results in possible government turnover, and in different predictions about possible government composition: for example, that the grand coalition may form.

Vorheriger Artikel Singularity and Arrow’s paradox

Nächster Artikel Condorcet winners on median spaces

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In contrast to Martin and Stevenson’s sample, UK governments only fell after losing elections (though the Callaghan government survived despite becoming a minority government between elections).

We ignore the second part of the dictum: that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Martin and Stevenson (2001) demonstrate that the formateur party typically shares power.

We studied the implications of a formateur in a previous version of this paper: Giovannoni and Seidmann (2012).

We are grateful to a referee for raising this issue.

For example, a caretaker government may lack authority to respond to an emergency.

A sufficient condition is \(K>\beta (2\xi +\theta )+\alpha /2\gamma \).

Lammers et al. (2010) provide experimental support for this interpretation. According to Gary Hart: “A reformer in office becomes an establishment figure by definition and then by definition resists the next round of reforms—it’s human nature” (NYT 02/17/08).

More generally, della Porta and Pizzorno (1996) discuss Italian corruption in terms of the breakdown of parties, the emergence of secret networks and the corrupting of individuals.

Note that we condition on a party being in government: a party in a hung parliament could ensure that it does not share power today because it wants to be pure tomorrow.

Lemma 2.2 implies that a corrupt party takes more graft in power than when sharing power. This property may be consistent with Acton’s suggestion that greater power is more corrupting.

See, for example, Epstein and Segal (2000) on empirical proxies for salience when surveys are unavailable.

The government which forms does not necessarily maximize moderates’ utility, as we explain at the end of this section.

The critical level of salience trades off reduced corruption against policy costs for moderates when \(M\) is turned out of power, as Rundquist et al. (1977) argue.

In light of Lemma 3.4, leftists and rightists can obviously do better than in the ergodic set.

Proof of this claim is available from the authors on request.

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Titel: Corruption and power in democracies
verfasst von: Francesco Giovannoni
Daniel J. Seidmann
Publikationsdatum: 01.03.2014
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Erschienen in: Social Choice and Welfare / Ausgabe 3/2014
Print ISSN: 0176-1714
Elektronische ISSN: 1432-217X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-013-0739-x

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