Theory predicts democracy should reduce corruption. Yet, scholars have found that while corruption is low at high levels of democracy, it is high at modest levels, as well as low when democracy is absent.
A weakness of studies that aim to explain this inverted curvilinear relationship is that they do not disaggregate the complex concepts of democracy and corruption. By contrast, this paper disaggregates both. Using Varieties of Democracy data, this paper examines 173 countries from 1900 to 2015 and demonstrates that the curvilinear relationship results from the collective impact of different components of democracy on different types of corruption.
The authors offer a framework that suggests how these components affect costs and benefits of engaging in different types of corruption and, therefore, the level of corruption overall.
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