New paper published: Corruption, scandals and incompetence: Do voters care?

The interests of voters and politicians can diverge and it is costly for the former to monitor the latter. This gives rise to a principal-agent problem. To reduce this problem, voters can try to vote politicians into office that are inherently motivated to implement their preferred policies or, alternatively, motivate politicians externally by voting for politicians that appear very capable (and thus not reelect politicians that did not perform well). This paper connects different types of misconduct to these two mechanisms and tests them using data on Dutch local elections in the period 2010-2018. The results show that parties with a corruption incident receive 3 percentage points fewer votes than similar parties without misconduct. Parties with a scandal or a failure receive around 1.5 percentage points fewer votes.