Media Coverage of Corruption and Incumbent Renomination1 Raffaele Asquer, University of California, Los Angeles2 Abstract Why do parties nominate allegedly corrupt legislators for reelection? I argue that media coverage of corruption influences party leaders’ decision to renominate legislators accused of corruption. When the media focus on the issue of corruption, thus increasing its public salience, party leaders do not to renominate corrupt legislators to avoid electoral losses. In addition, higher media coverage of the corruption allegations against legislators decreases their chances of being renominated. I use data from Italian parliamentary elections to test these hypotheses. Results of a matching analysis show that corruption allegations do not affect renomination when corruption receives little media coverage, whereas they decrease renomination chances when corruption receives wide media coverage. Using a Heckman selection model, I find that the number of newspaper articles mentioning corruption allegations is negatively and significantly associated with renomination. The results suggest that the media promote electoral accountability by influencing candidate nominations. Keywords: corruption, candidate selection, Italy, accountability, media 1 Manuscript prepared for the 2015 Meetings of the Western Political Science Association. Please do not cite without author’s permission. 2
[email protected] 1 1 Introduction In January 2013, Silvio Berlusconi, as the leader of Italy’s largest party, publicly announced that his party would not nominate for reelection the deputies who were under investigation, or on trial, for corruption.3 Coming from a leader often involved in criminal proceedings, it was an unexpectedly harsh decision. Five years earlier, for example, Berlusconi’s party had nominated for reelection several parliament members (henceforth, MPs) accused of corruption by the judiciary (Gomez & Travaglio, 2008).