Journal article
Witch hunts? Electoral cycles and corruption lawsuits in Argentina
- Abstract:
- Courts prosecuting corruption serve a critical horizontal accountability function, but they can also play a role in moments of vertical accountability when voters can sanction corrupt candidates. This article documents the strategic use of corruption lawsuits, demonstrating the presence of an electoral cycle in filing new corruption accusations against politicians. Using an original dataset of daily corruption complaints filed in federal courts against members of Argentina's main political coalitions between 2013 and 2021, we document increased corruption accusations against and by politicians in the periods immediately preceding an election. A second dataset of daily media coverage of corruption accusations in two leading newspapers suggests that corruption is more salient before elections, offering politicians a temporal focal point to prepare and launch especially impactful lawsuits. Our findings shed new light on using courts for accountability and debates about the so-called ‘lawfare’ in Latin America.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 525.8KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1017/S000712342300042X
Authors
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Journal:
- British Journal of Political Science More from this journal
- Volume:
- 54
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 629–648
- Publication date:
- 2023-11-08
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-06-28
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1469-2112
- ISSN:
-
0007-1234
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
1341251
- Local pid:
-
pubs:1341251
- Deposit date:
-
2023-05-15
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Feierherd et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record