This paper examines the extent to which government audits of public resources can reduce corruption by enhancing political and judiciary accountability. We do so in the context of Brazil’s anticorruption program, which randomly audits municipalities for their use of federal funds. We find that being audited in the past reduces future corruption by 8 percent, while also increasing the likelihood of experiencing a subsequent legal action by 20 percent. We interpret these reduced-form findings through a political agency model, which we structurally estimate. Our results suggest that the reduction in corruption comes mostly from the audits increasing the perceived nonelectoral costs of engaging in corruption.

We study a recent recruitment drive for public sector positions in Mexico. Different salaries were announced randomly across recruitment sites, and job offers were subsequently randomized. Screening relied on exams designed to measure applicants’ intellectual ability, personality, and motivation. This allows the first experimental estimates of (1) the role of financial incentives in attracting a larger and more qualified pool of applicants, (2) the elasticity of the labor supply facing the employer, and (3) the role of job attributes (distance, attractiveness of the municipal environment) in helping fill vacancies, as well as the role of wages in helping fill positions in less attractive municipalities. A theoretical model of job applications and acceptance guides the empirical inquiry. We find that higher wages attract more able applicants as measured by their IQ, personality, and proclivity toward public sector work—that is, we find no evidence of adverse selection effects on motivation; higher wage offers also increased acceptance rates, implying a labor supply elasticity of around 2 and some degree of monopsony power. Distance and worse municipal characteristics strongly decrease acceptance rates, but higher wages help bridge the recruitment gap in worse municipalities.

While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.

We study the politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats, a major populist radical-right party. Based on detailed administrative data, we present the first comprehensive account of which politicians are selected into such a party. Surveys show that politicians and voters of the Sweden Democrats share strong anti-establishment and anti-immigration attitudes that drastically set them apart from Sweden’s other parties. Searching for individual traits that link naturally to these attitudes, we classify the universe of Swedish politicians and voters by social and economic marginalization and exposure to immigration. Politicians from the Sweden Democrats over-represent marginalized groups without strong attachments to the labour market or to traditional nuclear families, which instead are under-represented among politicians in all other parties. Among voters, the Sweden Democrats have higher electoral support in precincts with higher shares of the same marginalized groups. We see the mobilization of the marginalized as an important driver of the party’s success. Finally, we uncover that Sweden-Democrat politicians score lower on a number of valence traits than other-party politicians. In sum, the rise of the Sweden Democrats raised political representation for marginalized groups, but this came at a valence cost.

Politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes throughout much of the developing world. We investigate how social networks facilitate these vote-buying exchanges. Our conceptual framework suggests brokers should be particularly well-placed within the network to learn about non-copartisans’ reciprocity in order to target transfers effectively. As a result, parties should recruit brokers who are central among non-copartisans. We combine village network data from brokers and citizens with broker reports of vote buying, allowing us to use broker and citizen fixed effects. We show that networks diffuse information about citizens to brokers who leverage it to target transfers. In particular, among those citizens who are not registered to their party, brokers target reciprocal citizens about whom they can learn more through their network, and these citizens are more likely to support the brokers’ party. Moreover, recruited brokers are significantly more central than other citizens among non-copartisans, but not among copartisans. These results highlight the importance of information diffusion through social networks for vote buying, broker recruitment, and ultimately for political outcomes.

Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capital, selecting on competence may lead to uneven representation. This article examines patterns of political selection among the universe of municipal politicians and national legislators in Sweden, using extraordinarily rich data on competence traits and social background for the entire population. We document four new facts that together characterize an “inclusive meritocracy.” First, politicians are on average significantly smarter and better leaders than the population they represent. Second, this positive selection is present even when conditioning on family (and hence social) background, suggesting that individual competence is key for selection. Third, the representation of social background, whether measured by parental earnings or occupational social class, is remarkably even. Fourth, there is at best a weak trade-off in selection between competence and social representation, mainly due to strong positive selection of politicians of low (parental) socioeconomic status. A broad implication of these facts is that it is possible for democracy to generate competent and socially representative leadership.