Bowers and Winters: Anti-Corruption Voting Research

The authors, Matthew S. Winters and Jake Bowers, discuss the limitations of survey data in evaluating development interventions, including those focused on governance. They highlight the importance of considering factors such as social desirability bias, question wording, and anonymity in survey design to obtain truthful answers. The paper also presents a case study on voter attitudes toward political corruption in Brazil, including a research design that uses an embedded survey experiment to investigate whether voters make a trade-off between corruption and public goods.