Evading Electoral Accountability: How Political Elites Maintain Electoral Support in Contexts of Corruption
Elections serve as a means to vote malfeasant politicians out of office, yet many malfeasant politicians secure reelection. In the context of political corruption, corruption allegations and scandals often fail to bring down implicated officials at the ballot box. Much research has investigated when voters will or will not punish corrupt politicians, primarily focusing on the voters themselves and the electoral contexts they find themselves in. Yet, voters do not operate in isolation; the electoral context is constantly influenced by the politicians that hold power. When political elites are accused of behaving corruptly, they do not stand back in silence until the next election. Rather, they still focus on how they can salvage their political careers despite corruption allegations. To better understand when voters will hold politicians accountable for corrupt behavior, my dissertation asks: what strategies will political elites employ to evade electoral accountability in contexts of corruption? I answer this question by studying different strategies that elites can use to evade accountability, and I study this in the Latin American context.
This project contributes to the discipline’s understanding of corruption voting by examining how elites can strategically escape electoral accountability, an approach not yet taken in the current literature. Instead of conceptualizing electoral accountability as a voter-only process, this project contributes to the theoretical perspective that a voter’s cost-benefit analysis of engaging in electoral accountability can be influenced by elites. Current research on corruption voting focuses solely on the voter and views elite as passive actors. In contrast, I theorize about the role elites can play in accountability. To investigate how elites evade electoral accountability, I use a variety of methodological approaches, including survey experiments, statistical analyses of observational data, and elite interviews. By studying what elites will do to evade electoral accountability, the field of political science can gain more insight into how political elites weaken an integral aspect of democratic governance.
My dissertation is funded by various sources at Rice University. I am a recipient of a James T. Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship from the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Office. With this award, I conducted fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during Fall 2022 in order to collect elite interview data for my dissertation. I am also a recipient of dissertation improvement grants from the Social Sciences Research Institute at Rice. These grants fund two original survey experiments in my dissertation which are fielded in various countries across Latin America.
This project contributes to the discipline’s understanding of corruption voting by examining how elites can strategically escape electoral accountability, an approach not yet taken in the current literature. Instead of conceptualizing electoral accountability as a voter-only process, this project contributes to the theoretical perspective that a voter’s cost-benefit analysis of engaging in electoral accountability can be influenced by elites. Current research on corruption voting focuses solely on the voter and views elite as passive actors. In contrast, I theorize about the role elites can play in accountability. To investigate how elites evade electoral accountability, I use a variety of methodological approaches, including survey experiments, statistical analyses of observational data, and elite interviews. By studying what elites will do to evade electoral accountability, the field of political science can gain more insight into how political elites weaken an integral aspect of democratic governance.
My dissertation is funded by various sources at Rice University. I am a recipient of a James T. Wagoner Foreign Study Scholarship from the Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Office. With this award, I conducted fieldwork in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during Fall 2022 in order to collect elite interview data for my dissertation. I am also a recipient of dissertation improvement grants from the Social Sciences Research Institute at Rice. These grants fund two original survey experiments in my dissertation which are fielded in various countries across Latin America.