3. The Ideological Incentive to Campaign on Corruption Issues: The Multi-party Case

This chapter extends the previous theoretical framework to consider explicitly also the multi-partisan case, while including in the analysis all the parties competing in a given election (both incumbent and opposition parties), as long as their incentive to highlight corruption issues is involved. The empirical part is focused on a large number of countries and elections in a comparative perspective (basically all Western democracies since post-WW2), while also investigating whether the impact of ideological considerations on campaigning on political corruption is mediated by some intervening variables (at the party level and/or electoral ones). The ‘valence outreach’ of the theory is then controlled for, by seeing whether it can be extended to cover non-policy valence issues other than corruption.