Does local corruption punish national parties votes?

Abstract

Since 1978, an important process of decentralization in terms of regional competences has been taking place in Spain. In consequence, the behaviour of the regional and local administration has obtained an increasing relevant role. This process has a direct impact on the performance of politicians both at local and regional level, and on the results of elections. Recent data on elections show that national parties have lost the voting race at local elections. Moreover, at the same time as the economic boom in this country in the 2000s, there was also a boom in political corruption at the local level. Using a database that includes municipal data from 2004 to 2011 in Spain, this paper evaluates whether national parties lose votes at national elections due to the wrongdoing of their local candidates. Moreover, we focus on partisan effects, splitting the analysis according to the two main political parties in Spain. Our study resembles an experimental design, which yields two main conclusions. First, local corruption affects significantly the parties’ votes at national level, being the magnitude of the effect around one percentage point in absolute values. Second and interestingly, the sign of the results also depends on whether the corruption is on the right or the left wing.