Political Corruption Cycles: High-Frequency Evidence from Argentina’s Notebooks Scandal
Exploiting daily records documenting how an organization of high-level bureaucrats in Argentina collected bribes and delivered them to party leaders from 2009 to 2015, I detect with unprecedented accuracy a political corruption cycle in narrow temporal windows around national elections. Bureaucrats, on average, collected about $350 thousand more in bribes and were 9.6 percentage points more likely to deliver cash to politicians on days within two weeks before elections than within two weeks after elections. These results are puzzling from the perspective of theories of democratic accountability, which predict that corruption should decrease with electoral proximity, but follow naturally when the factor motivating corruption is the need to finance political expenses. This article’s findings confirm that the motivation behind corruption is often to advance political goals rather than personal enrichment, and that competitive elections shape incentives for corruption in more complex ways than traditionally thought.