Corruption, scandals and incompetence: Do voters care?

Abstract

Accountability theory posits that elections weed out badly performing politicians, whereas type-selection theory posits that politicians who do not represent a (sufficiently large) group are ousted. This paper tests this by estimating the impact of various forms of misconduct by Dutch local government politicians on the vote share of their parties. It shows that incidents that reveal incompetence cost their parties 1.5 percentage points of the vote share, or roughly 10 percent of their voters. Incidents that expose politicians to be someone else than their public image suggests (i.e., scandals) have a similar cost. Incidents that reveal both simultaneously (i.e., corruption) cost parties almost double, namely 3 percentage points. The results show that the accountability and type-selection theories are both important in explaining voting behavior and suggest that there might be additional punishment when both theories predict a negative effect.