Does Power Corrupt? The Effect of Holding Local Political Office in Zambia on Generalized Trust and Altruistic Reciprocity

Scholars universally acknowledge government corruption to be widespread in Africa, yet there is no such agreement on whether office-holding tends to corrupt politicians or corrupt politicians tend to obtain office. Building on the corruption and behavioral economics literatures, we identify behavioral choices that we argue are linked to corruption. We conduct controlled experiments with over 140 local politicians in Zambia, sampling those who won or lost the last election by a margin of 10% or less, and use a regression discontinuity design to identify the local average treatment effect of holding office on the behavior of politicians. We find that holding office does have a significant effect on the strategic behavior on politicians. Specifically, at the electoral margin, holding office leads politicians to display higher levels of altruistic reciprocity. Possibly because of our low statistical power, we were not able to identify a significant effect of holding office on politicians’ level of generalized trust, although we did observe insignificant differences in the expected direction. * University of Southern California † University of California, San Diego