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AbstractExisting research shows that survey respondents are sensitive to the source of information about political corruption and respond more strongly to information from more credible sources. This behavior occurs more frequently among the politically sophisticated. In a nation-wide survey in Argentina, we successfully replicate results originally found in a study in Brazil. In addition, we examine whether citizens process information about corruption differently depending on their partisan identities. At odds with our initial expectations, we find that copartisans, opposition partisans, and other/non-partisans distinguish between information sources in very similar ways. These results suggest that even though partisanship affects baseline assessments of political candidates, citizens of all types are sensitive to the credibility of information they receive about political corruption.

There is a growing consensus that voters withdraw support from a politician when they receive clear information that the politician has engaged in corruption. But will voters punish an elected official for corrupt acts carried out under his or her watch even if the politician is not personally implicated in corruption? To answer this question, we present the results of an embedded experiment from a nationally representative survey in Brazil. Using vignettes that describe a hypothetical mayor, we find that citizens punish all mayors who are linked to corruption but that punishment is attenuated when members of the municipal administration, and not the mayor per se, are charged with corruption. The difference is particularly pronounced when corruption information comes from a credible source and among politically sophisticated respondents. Our findings highlight that both the nature of information and the characteristics of citizens who receive that information have implications for political accountability.

A number of recent studies have found that temporary members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) experience increased foreign aid inflows. We use a constrained permutations approach to replicate analyses found in Vreeland and Dreher (2014). Permuting the timing of country membership on the Security Council, we create placebo UNSC membership histories which plausibly could have been observed. We use these placebos to construct a reference distribution for the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between UNSC membership and foreign aid flows and then observe whether or not the observed test statistic for the correlation found in the real-world data is in the tails of this distribution. In other contexts, such empirically based hypothesis tests have revealed a high false-positive rate for traditional, model-based time-series cross-sectional inference. Given the controversial nature of studies about increased aid flows as secondary benefits of UNSC membership, it is valuable to subject such analyses to additional scrutiny. Our reanalysis largely validates existing findings.

Branding of foreign aid may undermine government legitimacy in developing countries when citizens see social services being provided by external actors. We run a survey experiment on a sample of Indian respondents. All subjects learn about an HIV/AIDS program; treated subjects learn that it was foreign-funded. Although the results are not statistically significant at conventional levels, the patterns in the data suggest that approval ratings for key government institutions are lower in the treatment conditions while assessments of government performance are higher. These contrasting effects point toward the multiple ways in which government legitimacy might be affected by the presence of foreign aid: political representatives might suffer reputational loss, while overall state legitimacy remains unchanged.

In long-standing democracies, the partisan attachments of most citizens are stable and not responsive to short-term political events. Recent studies from younger democracies, however, suggest that partisanship may be more malleable in these contexts. In this paper we develop hypotheses about how political corruption might affect voter attachment to the parties of corrupt officials or to the party system as a whole. Using data from an original survey experiment in Brazil, we show that prompts about political corruption shift patterns of partisan attachment for highly educated respondents - specifically, that corruption associated with one political party reduces nonpartisanship and significantly increases identification with other political parties. In contrast, we find that information on corruption has no consistent measurable effect on partisanship for less educated respondents. We conclude by discussing the implications of malleable partisanship for democratic accountability. (GIGA)

In young democracies with weak parties, there is some evidence that partisan identification may shift in response to short-term government performance. The massive protests that erupted in Brazil in June 2013 sharply increased the salience of, and public attention to, poor government performance and took most observers by surprise. They were also widely depicted as nonpartisan or even antipartisan. We use two well-timed surveys to examine the effects of the protests on mass partisanship. We find that the protests led to increased nonpartisanship and decreased attachment to the governing Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) among the public as a whole. We also show that small leftist parties were more broadly represented among protesters than has been previously recognized. Adapted from the source document.

In young democracies with weak parties, there is some evidence that partisan identification may shift in response to short-term government performance. The massive protests that erupted in Brazil in June 2013 sharply increased the salience of, and public attention to, poor government performance and took most observers by surprise. They were also widely depicted as nonpartisan or even antipartisan. We use two well-timed surveys to examine the effects of the protests on mass partisanship. We find that the protests led to increased nonpartisanship and decreased attachment to the governing Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT) among the public as a whole. We also show that small leftist parties were more broadly represented among protesters than has been previously recognized. (GIGA)