Political Corruption Cycles in Democracies and Autocracies: Evidence from Micro-data on Extortion in West Africa

Using two large cross-national micro datasets on extortion and commodity flows, I provide evidence of corruption cycles around elections in five West African states. In democracies but not in autocracies, police and other officials extort bribes that are 27% higher in the buildup to elections. These cycles occur on the intensive margin—the price at which bribes are set—rather than on the extensive margin—the total number of agents extorting. When incumbents lose, prices remain abnormally high. They only return to normal levels if incumbents win. I find no evidence of political cycles in the composition, quantity, or direction of commodity flows. This pattern of results lends little support to the claim that new democracies have higher corruption than autocracies because politicians use extortion for illicit campaign fundraising. Traditional political business cycles also do not appear to explain corruption cycles in this context. Rather, I argue that corruption cycles may result from independent decision-making by bureaucrats who need to insure against the uncertainty of future leadership. ∗With sincere thanks to the West African Tradehub and the Borderless Alliance for providing the data and assistance with fieldwork, and to the Columbia University Center for the Study of Development Strategies for funding. For very helpful feedback on the manuscript special thanks go to Kate Baldwin, Miriam Golden, Donald Green, Macartan Humphreys, Kimuli Kasara, and John Marshall, as well as participants at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), San Francisco, September 3, 2015 and at the Columbia University Mini-APSA workshop on December 9, 2016. †Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California San Diego. jaspercooper@ucsd.edu. http: //jasper-cooper.com Several theories of government predict that elections reduce corruption because political competition enhances the accountability of politicians (Ferejohn, 1986; Myerson, 1993; Rose-Ackerman, 1999; Przeworski et al., 2000; Adsera, Boix, and Payne, 2003; Persson, Tabellini, and Trebbi, 2003). However, the statistical relationship between political competition and cross-national measures of corruption suggests a more complicated story. While broadly negative (Treisman, 2000, 2007), the relationship exhibits a non-linear, inverted U, shape: corruption is frequently higher in new democracies where elections put leaders’ incumbency at stake than in autocracies where elections pose almost no threat to incumbents (Montinola and Jackman, 2002; Sung, 2004; Méndez and Sepulveda, 2006; Rock, 2009; Charron and Lapuente, 2010; Saha et al., 2014; McMann et al., 2017). McMann et al. (2017, 5) conclude their analysis with the claim that the mere introduction of competitive elections1 “unambiguously increases corruption. ” The question is whether the apparent relationship between corruption and competitive elections is causal. The previously cited studies measure this relationship through broad cross-national comparisons at the country-year level, based on indices built from expert-coded indicators. Unobserved confounders might cause a country to have elections that threaten incumbency and to have high perceived corruption, without any direct causal relationship between the two. Moreover, it is unclear what mechanisms produce such non-linear relationships. In this paper, I make use of a direct measure of corruption disaggregated to the country-day level in order to investigate the relationship between corruption and six elections taking place in the democracies of Ghana, Senegal, and Mali and two elections taking place in the autocracies of Burkina Faso and Togo. The data on corruption comes from surveys filled out by truck drivers on some 31,000 trips from 2006 to 2013, containing information on over 270,000 bribes extorted at checkpoints manned by police and other agents (Bromley and Foltz, 2011). To understand the data-generating process behind this dataset, I conducted participant observation with truck drivers. During a three-week period in 2014, I traveled over 800 miles of highway through Burkina Faso, In this paper, I distinguish between competitive and non-competitive elections. The distinction does not rest on a claim about the closeness of the actual election race, but about whether the institutions make it possible for a leader to lose. In competitive elections in democratic states, incumbency of the leader is at stake, even if the incumbent ends up winning by a substantial margin. In autocratic states, winning margins may be lower but the election is not more competitive in the sense that there is no question of the incumbent actually losing.