Coalition Governments and Corruption: A Comparative Analysis of the Post-War Cabinets in 38 Democracies

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the literature explaining corruption in democratic contexts. A general approach we rely on is the theory of collective action and the development of public goods, where the absence of corruption can be characterized as one type of ‘public good’. The question that we aim to answer here is, why are some states, at specific points in time, able to produce a non-corrupt state, whereas others are not? We contribute to the previous literature on corruption in two ways. First, we develop new hypotheses related to the idea that it matters what type of government is in place for corruption outcomes. We here draw, among other things, on the previous literatures on PR, clarity of responsibility and veto players, as related to political and bureaucratic corruption. Second, we make an empirical contribution to the literature by evaluating our hypotheses using a completely new data set on corruption, drawing on the so Varieties of Democracy data, allowing us to obtain more specific measures on the perception of governmental corruption across longer periods of time. Connecting such data with the ParlGov database which covers governments in 38 democratic countries (mostly in Europe) over the post-war period, we are able to systematically investigate the role of various cabinet-specific features on corruption levels across a large sample of country-years.