Legislative Institutions and Corruption in Developing Country Democracies

Abstract

This article extends the research on institutional sources of corruption by investigating whether legislative institutions play a significant role in driving corruption in developing country democracies. The author argues that when legislative rules (a) give parties control over agenda setting and (b) allow parties to strip legislators who vote against the party line of their legislative mandates, parties can exercise valuable influence over the legislative policy process, which allows them to engage in practices leading to higher corruption. The author derives two testable hypotheses linking higher party influence over agenda setting and voting in the legislature to higher corruption and test them by using a new data set on legislative rules for 64 developing country democracies from 1984 to 2004. The empirical results corroborate the hypotheses and remain robust when controlling for alternative explanations, employing different estimation techniques, and using different measures of corruption.