Cabinets, Prime Ministers, and Corruption: A Comparative Analysis of Parliamentary Governments in Post-War Europe
| Published date | 01 February 2019 |
| Author | Hanna Bäck,Staffan I Lindberg,Jan Teorell |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718760806 |
| Date | 01 February 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718760806
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(1) 149 –170
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321718760806
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Cabinets, Prime Ministers, and
Corruption: A Comparative
Analysis of Parliamentary
Governments in Post-War
Europe
Hanna Bäck1, Jan Teorell1 and
Staffan I Lindberg2
Abstract
Why are some states more corrupt than others? Drawing on the literature on governance in
parliamentary democracies, we suggest that the degree of corruption depends on the ability of
key political actors to control ministers who have been delegated power. We argue that the
Prime Minister has incentives to limit corruption within the cabinet and has the ability to do so
when there are certain “control mechanisms” at hand. One such mechanism is the PM’s ability
to fire or demote ministers who are not behaving in accordance with his or her wishes. We
hypothesize that governmental corruption will be lower in systems where the constitution grants
the PM strong powers. Using a new dataset (Varieties of Democracy), which provides more specific
measures on high-level corruption across a longer time period, we analyze corruption in 26 West
and East European democracies over the post-war period and find support for our hypothesis.
Keywords
coalition governments, government corruption, Prime Ministers, principal–agent theory,
parliamentary systems
Accepted: 1 February 2018
Introduction
Why are some governments more corrupt than others? Why do high-level officials in
some countries seem to “extract more rents” than others? There is a large literature
focusing on explaining the existence of such abuse across countries and over time,
where some scholars have focused on the role of various political–institutional features
1Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden
2Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Corresponding author:
Hanna Bäck, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Box 52, 22100 Lund, Sweden.
Email: Hanna.Back@svet.lu.se
760806PSX0010.1177/0032321718760806Political StudiesBäck et al.
research-article2018
Article
150 Political Studies 67(1)
within democratic systems, for example, investigating the impact of characteristics that
can be seen as “accountability enhancing” (see, for example, Schwindt-Bayer and
Tavits, 2016). Our aim here is to contribute to the literature on institutional features that
constrain corruption.
We present a complementary argument about what political–institutional features
should influence corruption, taking our starting point in the so-called “parliamentary
chain of delegation,” which suggests that power relationships in parliamentary democra-
cies can be described as a chain with a number of links. In this chain, voters are the ulti-
mate principals who delegate power to legislators through elections. However, voters
only indirectly delegate power to cabinet members in a parliamentary system, and we
here focus on the fact that the Prime Minister (PM) as a principal directly delegates power
to line ministers within the cabinet and also has the power to hold them accountable (see,
for example, Strøm, 2003).
We frame corruption as a principal–agent problem (e.g. Rose-Ackerman, 1978),
focusing on the delegation relationship between the PM and his or her cabinet minis-
ters. Our main expectation is that corruption among high-level officials should be lower
in systems where the constitutional power of the PM is high and where the PM has the
ability to control corruption in cabinet. Our theoretical argument is based on an assump-
tion that the PM has stronger incentives than individual ministers to limit corruption
within the cabinet, since policy outcomes are less likely to be in line with his or her
preferences when ministers are corrupt. Following the previous literature on coalition
governance, the PM should prefer to limit “ministerial drift,” whereas individual min-
isters have incentives and the opportunity to “drift” from the overall government policy
in their departments, unless there are some control mechanisms in place. One such
control mechanism is the PM’s ability to fire or demote those ministers who are not
behaving in accordance with the PM’s wishes (see, for example, Bergman et al., 2003).
The PM’s constitutional powers is an institutional feature that has not been in focus in
the previous corruption literature, and we, thus, make a theoretical contribution by
introducing this argument.
We make an empirical contribution to the literature by evaluating our hypotheses using
a completely new dataset on corruption, drawing on the Varieties of Democracy data
(Coppedge et al., 2015), allowing us to obtain more specific measures on the perception
of corruption across longer periods of time (McMann et al., 2016). We evaluate our
hypotheses by adding data on Western and Eastern European cabinets during the post-war
period from the European Representative Democracy Data Archive (Andersson et al.,
2014). Although not conclusive, since both corruption and PM powers are slow-moving
characteristics, our results indicate that corruption is significantly lower when the PM has
strong constitutional powers, suggesting that a strong PM is able to reduce agency prob-
lems within the cabinet.
Theory and Hypotheses
Previous Research on Political Institutions and Corruption
As described by Daniel Treisman (2007: 211), “Corruption is usually understood to mean
the ‘misuse of public office for private gain,’ where the ‘private gain’ may accrue either to
the individual official or to groups or parties to which he belongs.” Leslie Schwindt-Bayer
and Margit Tavits (2016: 5) describe two types of corruption, “street-level petty corruption”
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