Social Capital and Political Accountability

Abstract

In this paper, we empirically investigate a channel through which social capital may improve economic wellbeing and the functioning of institutions: political accountability. The main idea is that voters who share norms of generalized morality demand higher standards of behavior on their elected representatives, are more willing to bear the cost of acquiring information, and are more likely to base their vote on criteria of social welfare rather than (narrow) personal interest. We take this conjecture to the data using information on the Italian members of Parliament in the postwar period (1948{2001). The empirical evidence shows that electoral punishment of political misbehavior is considerably larger in electoral districts with high social capital, where social capital is measured by blood donation, while political misbehavior refers to receiving a request of criminal prosecution or shirking in parliamentary activity. Accordingly, political misbehavior is less frequent in districts with high social capital.JEL codes: D72, D73, Z10.

Public trust and corruption perception: disaster relief

“…If a local Chinese government was seen by the survey respondents as more corrupt than an NGO, its role as the aid administrator would reduce the perceived shares of aid going to the victims and raise the perceived shares of aid going to corruption. Such a finding would corroborate that corruption is more widespread in places with low trust in government organizations (Nannicini et al, 2013). If a local Chinese government was seen by survey respondents as administratively efficient as an NGO, our survey data would support the view that the respondents' trust are highly and negatively correlated with their corruption perceptions of a local Chinese government.…”

“…see Tavits, 2006;Nannicini et al, 2013). 9 What our data can show is the survey respondents' perceptions about disaster aid to China, given the widely publicized misuses of relief funds that have led to the general distrust in the local Chinese government in Sichuan (Han et al, 2011).…”

Do Fiscal Rules Matter?

“…We think that geographical location is a particularly interesting 34 The 1991 point estimate is 0.068 (0.082); the 2001 point estimate is −0.010 (0.076). dimension here because Italian geography is correlated with economic development, crime rates, and shirking (e.g., see Ichino and Maggi 2000;Nannicini et al 2013;Casaburi and Troiano 2016), and it could thus be associated with opportunistic manipulation too. Based on this large amount of supporting evidence on Assumption 1, in online Appendix Table A5, we directly test Assumption 2 under the maintained hypothesis that Assumption 1 holds.…”

Fiscal Transparency

“…Fourth, we include two control variables also considered by previous analyses: the percentage of voter abstention (Abs) and the percentage of elderly residents (Old). From Nannicini et al (2010), we might conclude that fiscal transparency is expected to be greater in municipalities with higher levels of social capital, since in those municipalities it is supposed that voters demand more information to politicians. Thus, among others, voter abstention and the percentage of elderly people might be partially picking up the level of social capital.…”