Government transparency and political clientelism: Evidence from randomized anti-corruption audits in Brazil

Political clientelism is considered a fundamental reason why politicians are not accountable and responsive to their constituencies. In this working paper, we study whether transparency initiatives – more specifically, top-down anti-corruption audits – can reduce the incidence of vote-buying and political clientelism in the context of Brazil’s municipal government anti-corruption program. This program selected municipalities at random to audit municipal finances, which allows for causal inference. We combine the audit program data for a sample of municipalities in the country’s Northeast region with a dedicated longitudinal survey we conducted in 2011-2013 of a large representative sample of impoverished rural households. This enables us to estimate short and long-term effects of the government anti corruption audits on subsequent levels of vote-buying and political clientelism.