Isolated Capital Cities, Accountability and Corruption: Evidence from US StatesFilipe R. Campante, Quoc-Anh Do
NBER Working Paper No. 19027 We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability, and in contrast with the alternative hypothesis that it might forestall political capture. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different accountability mechanisms over state politics: newspaper coverage, voter knowledge and information, and turnout. We also find evidence against the capture hypothesis: isolated capitals are associated with more money in state-level campaigns. Finally, we show that isolation is linked with worse public good provision. You may purchase this paper on-line in .pdf format from SSRN.com ($5) for electronic delivery.
Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w19027 Users who downloaded this paper also downloaded these:
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