Political decentralization and corruption: Exploring the conditional role of parties

This study investigates how national levels of corruption are influenced by the interaction of two factors in political decentralization: the presence of local elections and the organizational structure of national parties. Previous studies have focused primarily on the role of fiscal decentralization on corruption and have mostly ignored the institutions of political decentralization. Using new data in a series of expansive models across multiple countries and years, we find that corruption will be lower when local governments are more accountable to and more transparent toward their constituents. This beneficial arrangement is most likely to occur when local elections are combined with nonintegrated political parties, meaning that party institutions themselves are decentralized from national control. Such an institutional arrangement maximizes local accountability by putting the decision to nominate and elect local leaders in the hands of those best in a position to evaluate their honesty—local electors.