We study incumbency effects for individual legislators from two political parties (Christian Democracy and the Italian Socialist Party) in Italy’s lower house of representatives over ten legislatures (1948–1992). Results of a regression discontinuity design adapted to multimember...

We use a randomized saturation design to investigate whether domestic election observers reduce electoral fraud in the 2012 presidential elections in Ghana. Results show that observers reduce the probability of overvoting (more votes cast than registered voters) at observed stations by 60...

Utilizing new data on criminal charges against candidates to India's Fourteenth and Fifteenth Lok Sabha elections, we study the conditions that resulted in approximately a quarter of those elected to each legislature facing or having previously faced criminal charges. We show that Indian...

We analyze the relationship between electoral systems and corruption in a large sample of contemporary democratic nations. Whereas previous studies have shown that closed-list proportional representation is associated with greater (perceived) corruption than open-list PR, we demonstrate that...

We review a decade of literature on clientelism, a central topic in the study of developing democracies. We define clientelism as the discretionary distribution of public resources by politicians. We distinguish clientelism that occurs in the pre-electoral period (electoral clientelism) from...