When do voters punish corrupt politicians? Heterogeneous views about the importance of corruption can determine whether or not increased information enhances accountability. If partisan cleavages correlate with the importance voters place on corruption, then the consequences of information may vary by candidate, even when voters identify multiple candidates as corrupt. We provide evidence of this mechanism from a field experiment in a mayoral election in Brazil where a reputable interest group declared both candidates corrupt. We distributed fliers in the runoff mayoral election in São Paulo. Informing voters about the challenger's record reduced turnout by 1.9 percentage points and increased the opponent's vote by 2.6 percentage points. Informing voters about the incumbent's record had no effect on behavior. We attribute this divergent finding to differences in how each candidate's supporters view corruption. Using survey data and a survey experiment, we show that the challenger's supporters are more willing to punish their candidate for corruption, while the incumbent's supporters lack this inclination.
For many years, most scholars have assumed that the strength of reputational incentives is positively correlated with firm size. Firms that sell more products or services were thought more likely to be trustworthy than those that sell less because larger firms have more to lose if consumers decide they have behaved badly. That assumption has been called into question by recent work that shows that, under the standard infinitely repeated game model of reputation, reputational economies of scale will occur only under special conditions, such as monopoly, because larger firms not only have more to lose from behaving badly, but also more to gain. This article shows that reputational economies of scale exist even when there is competition and without other special conditions, if the probability that low quality is detected is positively correlated with the quantity of the good or service sold. It also shows that reputational economies of scale exist, under some circumstances, in a finite-horizon model of reputation. Reputational economies of scale help explain why law and accounting firms can act as gatekeepers, why mass market products are more likely to be safe, why firms are less likely to exploit one-sided contracts than consumers, and why manufacturers market new products under the umbrella of established trademarks.
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