¹ For a useful collection of some of this work, see Heidenheimer, Arnold J., ed., Political Corruption: Readings in Comparative Analysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), especially Chapters 6 and 9Google Scholar, and Gardiner, John A. and Olson, David J., eds., Theft of the City (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

There is no consensus in this literature on the standards appropriate to determining which political acts are “corrupt.” For some, political acts which violate the public interest for private interest or gain are corrupt. See, for instance, Rogow, Arnold A. and Lasswell, Harold D., Power, Corruption, and Rectitude (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), pp. 132–134 Google Scholar. In a similar manner, Berg, Hahn, and Schmidhauser define political corruption as a process which “violates and undermines the norms of the system of public order which is deemed indispensable for the maintenance of political democracy.” See Berg, Larry L., Hahn, Harlan, and Schmidhauser, John R., Corruption in the American Political System (Morristown, New Jersey: General Learning Press, 1976), p. 3 Google Scholar. Other authors hold that a political act is corrupt if the public deems it so. See, for example, Heidenheimer's, Arnold J. typology of corrupt acts based on this “public opinion” criterion, Political Corruption, pp. 26–28 Google Scholar. A third standard for assessing corrupt acts relies predominantly on legal norms: those acts are corrupt which violate the rules or norms of public-office holding for personal or private gain. See Nye, J. S., “Corruption and Political Development: A Cost-Benefit Analysis,” American Political Science Review, 61 (06, 1967), 417–427 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Scott, James C., Comparative Political Corruption (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972), pp. 3–5 Google Scholar for an excellent discussion of the definitions of political corruption. In this paper we have chosen this latter criterion and define political corruption as engaging in illegal activity for personal or special interest gain.

² Wilson, James Q., “Corruption: The Shame of the States,” The Public Interest, 2 (Winter, 1966), 28–38, at p. 30Google Scholar, also reprinted in Heidenheimer, pp. 298–306.

³ Wilson, p. 31. Here Wilson is referring to an argument made in 1904 by Ford, Henry Jones in his “Municipal Corruption,” Political Science Quarterly, 19 (12, 1904), pp. 673–686 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This same theme is developed by Sait, Edward M. in “Machine, Political,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, IX (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), 657–661 Google Scholar; by Bentley, Arthur F., The Process of Government, ed. Odegard, Peter H. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), Chapter IICrossRefGoogle Scholar; and by Merton, Robert K., Social Structure and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 73 Google Scholar.

⁴ Wilson, , “Corruption,” p. 31 Google Scholar.

⁵ James Bryce, in analyzing the incidence of corruption in the nineteenth-century Congress, claimed that the “opportunities for private gain are large, the chances of detection small,” and because of the relatively short tenure of most members, “the temptation to make hay while the sun shines is all the stronger.” See Bryce, James, The American Commonwealth, Hacker, Louis M., ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1959), Vol. I, p. 221 Google Scholar.

⁶ Ibid., p. 197.

⁷ For the typology of incentives alluded to here, see Clark, Peter B. and Wilson, James Q., “Incentive Systems: A Theory of Organizations,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 6 (09, 1961), 129–166 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Solidary inducements are intangible rewards which accrue from socializing or group identification. Banfield and Wilson, for instance, refer to a precinct captain who offers “personal friendship” in return for a vote. See Banfield, Edward C. and Wilson, James Q., City Politics (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 117 Google Scholar. On the use of material incentives to induce electoral support, see Gosnell, Harold F., Machine Politics: Chicago Model, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), chapter IVGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Of course, in principle, politicians, like other citizens, are subject to prosecution for breaking laws, and this threat would seem to constrain their participation in illegal activities. This is not an issue here, since our focus is on the electoral rather than the legal constraint. For a journalistic treatment of the former point, see Liberman, Jethro K., How the Government Breaks the Law (New York: Stein and Day, 1974)Google Scholar.

⁹ This argument follows from the familiar logic of rational party behavior. See Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), chapter 3Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Gardiner, John A., The Politics of Corruption: Organized Crime in an American City (New York: Russell Sage, 1970)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Greenstein, Fred I., The American Party System and the American People (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963), pp. 47–49 Google Scholar.

¹² Banfield and Wilson, p. 122.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ This formulation of rational choice is based on similar models developed by economists and psychologists. An early version of the economic model can be found in Davis, Otto A. and Hinich, Melvin J., “A Mathematical Model of Policy Formation in a Democratic Society,” in Mathematical Applications in Political Science II, ed. Bernd, J. L. (Dallas: Arnold Foundation, Southern Methodist University Press, 1966), 175–205 Google Scholar, see also, Davis, Otto A., Hinich, Melvin J. and Ordeshook, Peter C., “An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process,” American Political Science Review, 64 (06, 1970), 426–448 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the psychological formulation, see Fishbein, Martin, “A Behavior Theory Approach to the Relations between Beliefs About an Object and the Attitude toward the Object,” in Readings in Attitude Theory and Measurement, ed. Fishbein, Martin (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1967), pp. 389–400 Google Scholar. This approach is applied to voting behavior in Fishbein, Martin and Coombs, Fred S., “Basis for Decision: An Attitudinal Approach toward an Understanding of Voting Behavior,” paper presented at the sixty-seventh Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, 1971 Google Scholar. A useful synthesis of the economic and psychological choice models is presented in Shapiro, Michael J., “Rational Political Man: A Synthesis of Economic and Social-Psychological Perspectives,” American Political Science Review, 63 (12, 1969), 1106–1119 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ At a more general level, James C. Scott's theory of the relationship between changing loyalty patterns and the type of inducements political parties must offer for support fit as well with our own notions of individual candidate and voter choice. For instance, Scott suggests that, as the process of economic growth forges new occupational and class loyalties among former supporters, the political party must change the nature of its inducements “to stress policy concerns or ideology.” See Scott, James C., “Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Change,” American Political Science Review, 63 (12, 1969), 1142–1158, at p. 1146CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Our distinction between implicit and explicit trading is analogous to that between implicit and explicit logrolling suggested by Buchanan and Tullock. Regarding implicit logrolling, they say:

Here there is no formal trading of votes, but an analogous process takes place. The political “entrepreneurs” who offer candidates or programs to the voters make up a complex mixture of policies designed to attract support. In so doing, they keep firmly in mind the fact that the single voter may be so interested in the outcome of a particular issue that he will vote for the one party that supports their issue, although he may be opposed to the party stand on all other issues.

Buchanan, James M. and Tullock, Gordon, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), pp. 134–135 Google Scholar.

¹⁷ The experiment was conducted oil the PLATO III computer-based education system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A description of this system and the experiment is contained in the Appendix. For a more detailed description of the PLATO system, see Alpert, D. and Bitzer, D., “Advances in Computer-Based Education,” Science, 167 (03, 1970), 1582–1590 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹⁸ For descriptions of generalized least squares regression, especially with dummy variables and limited dependent variables, see Johnston, J., Econometric Methods, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), pp. 208–242 and 176–186Google Scholar; and Goldberger, Arthur S., Econometric Theory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1964), pp. 251–255 Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Initially there were 217 subjects in our experiment but nine were dropped because of missing data on one or more of the questionnaire items. Also, note that the F-levels reported in Table 1 as well as those in Tables 3 and 5 indicate that each variable makes a significant contribution to the explanatory power of the estimated equations. However, as is evident, from an examination of the standard errors reported in these tables, several of the estimated coefficients are not significantly different from zero. Hence, care must be taken not to attribute too much to the exact values of the coefficients.

²⁰ This is the standard party identification item used by the Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, for their Presidential Election Studies.

²¹ For the purposes of our experiment, we have called respondents “intense” when they recorded their feelings in position 1, 2, 6, or 7 on our seven-point scales:

This measurement technique is very similar to the one employed by Martin Fishbein to measure the “evaluative aspects of belief statements.” See, Fishbein, and Coombs, , “Basis for Decision,” p. 12 Google Scholar.

²² For the “Honesty in Government” question, a respondent was called “intense” if a 6 or 7 was marked on the item.

²³ For related speculation, see Banfield, Edward, Political Influence (New York: The Free Press, 1961), p. 259 Google Scholar.

²⁴ The best statement of the convergence model is given by Downs, Economic Theory of Democracy. Multidimensional versions of this model are presented in Otto Davis et al., “Development of a Mathematical Model.” For a demonstration of divergence in the 1968 presidential election, see Page, Benjamin I., “Presidential Campaigning, Party Cleavage, and Responsible Parties,” unpublished paper, University of Chicago, 1974 Google Scholar.

²⁵ Wilson, James Q. and Banfield, Edward, “Political Ethos Revisited,” American Political Science Review, 65 (12, 1971), 1048–1062 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, McClosky, Herbert, “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” American Political Science Review, 58 (06, 1964), 361–382 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, showing that more political leaders than followers advocate clean government.

On the relationship between economic conditions and voting, see Kramer, Gerald K., “Short-Term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896–1964,” American Political Science Review, 65 (03, 1971), 131–143 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ For attempts to explain recent trends concerning trust in government, see Miller, Arthur H., “Political Issues and Trust in Government: 1964–1970,” American Political Science Review, 68 (09, 1974), 951–972 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Citrin, Jack, “Comment: The Political Relevance of Trust in Government,” American Political Science Review, 68 (09, 1974), 973–988 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.