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When do voters consider candidates for elected office to be corrupt? If corruption is strongly disfavored by voters, why do corrupt candidates remain popular and keep get-ting reelected? These questions are of great importance for a number of reasons. First, understanding how voters perceive candidate corruption can be predictive in determining electoral outcomes. When evaluating candidates accused of impropriety, success in the voting booth for these candidates can be an indicator of prevailing social norms to-ward corruption. Second, having an empirical foundation for how the public perceives corruption can also serve as an important basis for designing interventions to change such norms, including campaign finance reform and anti-corruption laws. Third, under-standing regional differences in voter perceptions of candidates can lead toward building theories explaining variation in toleration of candidate corruption. Finally, uncovering divergence in how courts, laws, and the public define corruption has implications for the legitimacy of democratic institutions and electoral accountability.The first chapter analyzes how voters conceptualize the corruption of political candidates, and offers explanatory and predictive frameworks that include the most important variables that factor into the voter's decision and predict individual voting behavior when a candidate accused of corruption is up for election. The second chapter, co-authored with F. Daniel Hidalgo and Yuri Kasahara, tests the causal effect of informing voters of corruption on voting behavior with a field and survey experiment in a mayoral election. The experiments show voters' varied responses to corruption information and argues for a novel mechanism that explains the results. The final chapter examines a number of mechanisms that explain why voters support or punish corrupt politicians, raising new research questions for scholars to consider in future research.

The International Court of Justice has jurisdiction over disputes between nations, and has decided dozens of cases since it began operations in 1946. Its academic defenders argue that the ICJ decides cases impartially and confers legitimacy on the international legal system. Its critics – mostly outside the academy – argue that the members of the ICJ vote the interests of the states that appoint them. Prior empirical scholarship is ambiguous. We test the charge of political bias using statistical methods. We find strong evidence that (1) judges favor the state that appoints them; (2) judges favor states whose wealth level is close to that of the judges' own state; and (3) judges favor states whose political system is similar to that of the judges' own state. We find weak evidence that judges are influenced by regional and military alignments.

AbstractWhen do voters punish corrupt politicians? Heterogeneous views about the importance of corruption can determine whether or not increased information enhances accountability. If partisan cleavages correlate with the importance voters place on corruption, then the consequences of information may vary by candidate, even when voters identify multiple candidates as corrupt. We provide evidence of this mechanism from a field experiment in a mayoral election in Brazil where a reputable interest group declared both candidates corrupt. We distributed fliers in the runoff mayoral election in São Paulo. Informing voters about the challenger's record reduced turnout by 1.9 percentage points and increased the opponent's vote by 2.6 percentage points. Informing voters about the incumbent's record had no effect on behavior. We attribute this divergent finding to differences in how each candidate's supporters view corruption. Using survey data and a survey experiment, we show that the challenger's supporters are more willing to punish their candidate for corruption, while the incumbent's supporters lack this inclination.