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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:
http://hdl.handle.net/2451/31628
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| Title: | Immunity |
| Authors: | Reddy, Karthik
Schularick, Moritz
Skreta, Vasiliki |
| Keywords: | accountability, corruption, immunity, interest groups |
| Issue Date: | 2-Oct-2012 |
| Abstract: | Statutory immunity provisions that limit the criminal liability of
politicians exist throughout much of the modern democratic world. Though
anecdotal evidence suggests that immunity promotes corruption, neither
the political economy literature on accountability nor the empirical
literature on the determinants of corruption has devoted attention to
the immunity of politicians. A likely reason for this omission is the
dearth of available data. In this paper we quantify the strength of
immunity protection in 74 democracies and verify that the strength of
immunity is strongly associated with corruption on an aggregate level.
To our knowledge, this represents the first systematic attempt to code
the strength of immunity protection for politicians and test its impact
on corruption. We show both theoretically and empirically that immunity
provisions add an important new dimension to the study of accountability
and corruption. The incidence of corruption soars when politicians are
placed above the law. This key empirical finding echoes, among others,
the relationship between diplomatic immunity and parking violations, as
uncovered by Fisman and Miguel (2007). Our study also parallels recent
work on political protection for tax evasion in Southern Europe such as
Artavanis et al. (2012). |
| URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2451/31628 |
| Appears in Collections: | Economics Working Papers
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