A Dynamic Model for Analysing Partisan Political Corruption in Local Government: the Spanish Experience

Abstract

Partisan political corruption behaviour has not been properly examined in the academic literature. Accordingly, the main aim of this paper is to determine the nature of the relationship between corruption and political ideology, doing so via a novel dynamic partisan approach which will enable us to measure the influence of the passage of time on the likelihood of the existence of political corruption and to determine whether this likelihood is stronger or weaker in progressive vs. conservative governments. This approach will also allow us to determine the influence of the different explanatory factors, among which are the creation of networks with related private companies by means of reiterative contracts, public-private agreements and other public-private networks, addressed in such a way that private companies with specific interests, political factors (political fragmentation and gender) and the long-term neighbourhood effect are all considered. Survival analysis is applied to 747 cases of political corruption that occurred during the period 2002- 2014 in Spanish local government. Our findings show that a significantly larger number of cases have been identified of corruption by conservative than by progressive parties. Moreover, the cases identified of corruption by conservative parties remain undetected and unprosecuted for longer.