Understanding Electoral Accountability: Why Corrupt Parties Are Sometimes Rewarded and Sometimes Punished

There is a more or less unanimous consensus among scholars that politicians and parties that are involved in corruption scandals are punished on election day, but only to a limited extent and oftentimes not severely enough to vote them out of office. A large number of studies have focused on the conditions under which electoral accountability take place. What is missing so far however is a more qualitative comparative approach, where factors such as the type and magnitude of the corruption scandals are taken into account as well as the parties’, the media’s and the judicial responses to them, factors which arguably impact the voter reaction and the extent of electoral accountability. To address this gap, this paper uses a large database on political parties’ involvement in corruption scandals in Europe during the last 35 years to examine major corruption scandals in four to six elections in Europe during the 2000s, two or three in which the incumbent parties were punished by the voters and two or three where they were not.