structure and the ability of parties to extract resources from the State. The linkage is concerned with
the manner in which the resources of political corruption are actually supplied, not simply the level at
which they are demanded.
From this perspective, a move from open to closed lists will dampen the demand side but intensify
the supply side. A move from closed to open lists will have the opposite effect. Due to the existence of
countervailing pathways through which ballot structure affects political corruption, the schizophrenia
characterizing the policy debate is perhaps not all that surprising after all.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the dominant paradigm for thinking about the
relationship between ballot structure and political corruption, and it discusses a number of country cases
in Latin America that expose serious shortcomings in the paradigm. Section 3 argues for the importance
of the supply side perspective and presents a formal model of supply side political corruption. The model,
which utilizes a principal agent framework with hidden knowledge, explicitly considers how differences
in ballot structure may facilitate or impede corrupt ’contracts’ from forming between party leaders and
militants in the public administration. Section 4 details the observable implications of the model. The
final section concludes.
2
Ballot Structure and Corruption: The Traditional Paradigm
With injustice to the wide variety of ballots found around the world, we can categorize electoral systems
as falling into two types: those which allow voters to choose among candidates and those which limit
voters to a choice among closed party lists. Electoral systems which allow voters to cast their votes for
one or more candidates, such as OLPR, the single non-transferable vote (SNTV), the single transferable
vote (STV) and single member simple plurality (SMSP) have been associated with candidate strategies
based on cultivating a ‘personal vote’ and generating narrowly focused, parochial policy outputs (Cain
et al. 1987, Carey and Shugart 1995, Ames 1995, Mainwaring 1999). Moreover, scholars have singled out
two variants of the above systems, OLPR and SNTV, as being highly propitious to political corruption.
1
The purported link between ballot structure and political corruption is based on the high demand for
campaign resources that these systems generate.
In OLPR and SNTV systems (as well as STV systems), candidates for legislative posts may compete
simultaneously against candidates from other parties as well as members of their own party list. Forced
3
Convention