Party System Competitiveness And Corruption

Existing literature argues that higher levels of party system competitiveness alter the incentive structure for politicians in such a way as to decrease corruption. The assumption is that politicians are concerned with preserving their power and anticipate the possibility of voter and/or party sanctioning. Political adversaries have more incentives to investigate and expose corruption (della Porta, 2004). When voters have greater access to information, the risks of adverse selection and moral hazard decrease (Schleiter and Voznaya, 2014).
Grzymala-Busse (2007) examines how post-communist political parties reconstructed the state in post-communist Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia and found a high negative correlation (-.85) between political competition and exploitation of the state. Even the most opportunistic political parties reigned in corrupt behavior when faced with higher levels of political competition. When ruling political parties faced a credible risk of replacement posed by robust competition, corrupt politicians limited their extraction of state resources (Grzymala-Busse, 2007).
Other studies challenge the notion of a negative linear relationship between party system competitiveness and corruption. These studies argue that the

As Schleiter and Voznaya (2014) point out, these studies often rely on the assumption that competitiveness translates to the number of active political parties or on the patterns of party dominance. Other commonly used measures include ideological polarity, electoral turnover, and party system openness (often determined by party thresholds). While these factors do impact competitiveness, a more accurate measure would be obtained by evaluating an in-depth range of