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Recent empirical studies have found a incumbency disadvantage in many developing democracies, in marked contrast with the well-known incumbency advantage in the US and other developed democracies. We know considerably less about incumbency disadvantage than incumbency advantage. In a simple principal-agent framework, I explore the role of a prominent feature of developing democracies – corruption. When rents are constant in incumbents' tenure – a standard assumption – the conditions for incumbency disadvantage are existent but limited; however, increasing rents, possibly due to learning, a gradual build-up of rent-extraction networks or fiscal windfalls, considerably increase the possibility of incumbency disadvantage, because voters may prefer inexperienced and unconnected challengers, even if they are of lower quality. Incumbency disadvantage becomes more likely as the pace of rent increase grows, politician quality decreases, with noise in the policy outcome, and potentially even when the pool of politicians improves. It is strictly more costly than any electoral outcome with high but constant-rents. The results highlight a novel reason for control of corruption and sensitivity to its dynamics.

We study how representation works in a context where accountability to voters is restricted because of term limits and accountability to parties is limited because of party weakness. Analyzing all Brazilian mayoral elections between 1996 and 2012 using a regression discontinuity design, we show that becoming the incumbent party results in large subsequent electoral losses. We theorize that the presence of term limits, combined with political parties to which politicians are only weakly attached, affects the incentives and behavior of individual politicians in such a way that their parties' suffer systematic losses. A descriptive analysis of an original dataset on the career paths of Brazilian mayors suggests that our assumptions are an accurate description of Brazil's political context, and we find support for three central empirical implications of our theoretical explanation. Moreover, based on an analysis of additional data from Mexico, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia, we show that the negative effects found in Brazil also exist in other democracies.

An index of ethnic segregation conveys the extent of spatial mixing of ethnic groups, whereas an index of ethnic polarization and similar diversity measures show the overall balance between the groups. We present a game-theoretic model of conflict in which local success of one ethnic group encourages attacks by its co-ethnics in neighboring areas. Conditional on conflict breaking out, we find that for highly ethnically polarized societies, increasing ethnic segregation decreases the incidence and intensity of conflict. In contrast, in societies with low ethnic polarization, increasing segregation increases conflict. This is because segregation and polarization jointly determine the spread of conflict, an important channel that has been neglected previously. We find strong empirical support for model predictions in two very different conflicts: Hindu–Muslim riots in the 1980s and 1990s in India and the Bosnian Civil War from 1992 to 1995.

Abstract
A growing body of research explores the factors that affect when corrupt politicians are held accountable by voters. Most studies, however, focus on one or few factors in isolation, leaving incomplete our understanding of whether they condition each other. To address this, we embedded rich conjoint candidate choice experiments into surveys in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. We test the importance of two contextual factors thought to mitigate voters' punishment of corrupt politicians: how widespread corruption is and whether it brings side benefits. Like other scholars, we find that corruption decreases candidate support substantially. But, we also find that information that corruption is widespread does not lessen the sanction applied against corruption, whereas information about the side benefits from corruption does, and does so to a similar degree as the mitigating role of permissible attitudes toward bribery. Moreover, those who stand to gain from these side benefits are less likely to sanction corruption.

"Breaking (the New) Iron Triangle: Corruption, Voters, and Politicians" published on by Oxford University Press.

AbstractWe study how parties balance the benefits of disciplined programmatic campaigning with the electoral appeal of charismatic but potentially unfaithful candidates. We incorporate the well‐known collective action problem arising from candidates' inability to fully internalize the fruits of programmatic brand building. Although parties may strategically use promotions to induce brand building efforts, we show that the party may be unable to commit to such a promotion scheme when the electoral returns to candidate charisma are high. We further demonstrate how electoral volatility and parties' ingroup loyalties shape their commitment to reward brand building. Volatility increases the focus on candidate charisma and decreases programmatic campaigning, but only among parties with weak group attachments. Parties with loyal partisans place emphasis on both candidate charisma and programmatic messaging. Empirical analyses of cross‐national data and quantitative and qualitative case studies in Brazil, Austria, and Spain are consistent with our predictions.