The Effects of Government Alternation on the Capacity of Political Systems to Constrain Corruption

The paper deals with the relationship between government alternation and political corruption. The main purpose is to understand if political competition, and especially the attribute of government alternation, plays a significant role in constraining corrupt behaviours of public officials. Although important democratic theories attribute to the concept of cabinet alternation a specific normative relevance, there is a general lack of works that analyse empirically its effects. The theoretical argument that guides my analysis stems from the “Public Choice” school which attributes the phenomenon of political corruption to a general lack of competition in both economic and political arenas. The presence of government alternation increases the degree of political competitiveness because it makes elected officials accountable to their voters and thus reduces the incentives of being involved in corrupt interactions. I propose a multidimensional concept of alternation based on two main analytical dimensions: the possibility of alternation and its empirical occurrence. Thus, I advance two research hypotheses. First, institutional structures that offer a more concrete possibility of alternation help to constrain corruption; second, countries that present higher past levels of alternation are related to a better capacity to control corruption. I test these hypotheses through a cross-sectional research design on a sample composed by 32 liberal democracies, including also several east European countries, for a period that goes from the 1946 to 2004. The results obtained from the empirical analysis confirm the research hypotheses only regarding the ideological dimension of alternation.