A Replication of “Corruption and Elections

Using cross-national panel data, Krause and Méndez recently studied whether voters retract support from political candidates who they think are corrupt. Their main finding is that corruption in public office is effectively punished by voters. Given the well-known issues with adequately measuring corruption, this note examines the sensitivity of extant findings to an alternate corruption measure. We fail to find a statistically robust effect of corruption on electoral outcomes.