The electoral consequences of individual perceptions of corruption are an important component of political accountability. In this paper we are concerned with what drives variation in corruption voting across countries. While the accountability through elections mechanism is assumed as a force that can combat corruption, this is rarely tested with a combination of individual and system level data as we do here. We argue, and findings suggest that it is so, that features of the party system related to clarity of responsibility in terms of policy outputs and stable system features such as plurality electoral rules might prime corruption as an issue in voting calculations and therefore increase accountability. Individual level attributes do not seem to affect corruption voting in the ‘desired’ direction. If anything, attachment to parties tends to dampen the effects of corruption evaluations on incumbent voting. We test our expectations with a combination of individual level survey data from Module 2 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and macro level data from various sources.
