Papers › Electoral Crime Under Democracy: Information Effects from Judicial Decisions in Brazil
Electoral Crime Under Democracy: Information Effects from Judicial Decisions in Brazil
Andre Assumpcao
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
This paper examines voters' responses to the disclosure of electoral crime information in large democracies. I focus on Brazil, where the electoral court makes candidates' criminal records public before every election. Using a sample of local candidates running for office between 2004 and 2016, I find that a conviction for an electoral crime reduces candidates' probability of election and vote share by 10.3 and 12.9 percentage points (p.p.), respectively. These results are not explained by (potential) changes in judge, voter, or candidate behavior over the electoral process. I additionally perform machine classification of court documents to estimate heterogeneous punishment for severe and trivial crimes. I document a larger electoral penalty (6.5 p.p.) if candidates are convicted for severe crimes. These results supplement the information shortcut literature by examining how judicial information influences voters' decisions and showing that voters react more strongly to more credible sources of information.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections