Who Cares about Political Corruption? Elite and Mass Electoral Accountability in Romanian Local Elections

While retrospective models of voting posit that voters should ‘vote the rascals out’, a wave of recent research has found that this is rarely the case. We investigate this question in a context in which many sitting politicians have recently been indicted on corruption charges – the municipal level in Romania, a surprisingly under-researched case in this sub-field. Romania should be a good case for electoral accountability. Not only do Romanians deeply detest corruption, the party system also contains many parties which would make it easy for voters to switch from a corrupt to a clean party. We collected an original data register of electoral and socio-political data on roughly 3,300 localities together with all cases of corruption charges published by the Romanian anti-corruption agency, the Direcţia Naţională Anticorupţie (DNA), accounting for severity, cost and time prior to the next election in which the mayor was charged. In all, we find that roughly 80 sitting mayors elected in 2012 were charged with corruption prior to the 2016 election. We test the electoral impact of corruption on three outcomes – whether mayors are more likely to retire (elite accountability), to lose vote share or to lose the election (mass accountability) using a pairwise matching design. The results show that despite Romanians claiming in survey after survey that corruption is one of the country’s central problems, politicians charged with corruption do not lose more often than similar ‘clean’ mayors, nor do they lose greater vote share regardless of the magnitude and timing of the scandal and the legal outcome for the mayor. They are however more likely to retire prior to the election. We thus find a certain amount of elite accountability, but a complete absence of mass accountability.