Can Institutions Make Voters Care about Corruption?

Voters’ punishment of corrupt politicians at the ballot box is oftentimes modest, at best. Recent studies suggest that this minor electoral sanctioning is due to limited corruption information and to the relative weakness of integrity considerations in voting behavior. We demonstrate that anticorruption measures taken by elite institutions—in this case, the Israeli Supreme Court—in close proximity to an election can increase electoral sanctioning by enhancing the importance of integrity considerations, holding corruption information fixed. We use the variation in incumbent integrity across time and space to identify the effect of an exogenous anticorruption decision by the Supreme Court on voting (study 1). We further test this effect in a novel survey experiment, with mayoral performance satisfaction as the dependent variable (study 2). Both studies demonstrate that judicial bodies have the capacity to influence electoral behavior by enhancing the importance of integrity considerations, holding corruption information constant.