As demonstrated by my First Theorem of Government, as well as by my four-part “Wretched Hive” series (see here, here, here, and here), I assume that corruption is a natural feature of government.

And the bigger a government is, the greater the opportunity for corruption.

That’s true in all areas: trade policy, tax policy, regulatory policy, health policy, defense policy, environmental policy, monetary policy, spending policy, bailout policy, etc.

But I’ve never assumed that one party is better or worse. Yes, there is lots of corruption with Trump and his cronies (as well as pre-Trump GOPers), but the same is true for Democrats (the Clintons, the Bidens, etc).

Indeed, my instinctive bias is that ideological politicians (whether conservatives like Reagan or leftists like Bernie Sanders) are less likely to be corrupt for the simple reason that they are most interested in changing the world.

But maybe my pox-on-both-houses assumption is wrong. A new academic study by Paula López-Villalba and Christian Ruzzier has found a much stronger link between left-wing governments and corruption.

Here are some excerpts.

Corruption (the misuse of public office for private gain) costs at least 3-5% of world GDP each year… In looking for the common characteristics of corrupt countries, the literature has identified several robust correlations … Corruption is negatively associated with, for instance, income, education, Protestant religion, common law, deregulation, media diffusion, democracy, economic freedom, and international trade – to name a few… More interesting for our purposes in this paper, corruption appears to be positively correlated with the presence of a left-wing government – even after controlling for GDP per capita, income inequality, and dummies for the dominant religion, a recent history of war, and a history of communist rule… This paper estimates the causal effect of electing a government with a left-wing ideology on overall corruption. …We first show that, on average, countries under left-wing governments experience more systemic corruption in the four years after the election – a 13.2% increase in the index compared to the mean of non-left governments.

The authors consider some of the reasons why leftist governments produce more corruption.

Higher corruption may be the outcome of left-wing governments implementing different policies. For instance, left-leaning parties in power tend to favor more intrusive rules and regulations – which give public officials the power to demand and collect bribes…larger public sectors – which may imply extended opportunities for bribery and other forms of corruption…and direct control of the means of production. …left-wing parties in power…do seem to intervene more through state ownership of the means of production, especially in countries with weaker checks and balances. We also find a large but imprecisely estimated effect of left-wing governments on a measure of regulation. …we find that the left in power runs bureaucracies of lower quality, with less meritocratic recruitment and less impartial administration, which is consistent with our results on public sector, or petty, corruption. We also produce evidence that the executive is less constrained by the legislature and the judiciary under left-wing governments – consistent with our results on grand corruption.

All of this sounds plausible. Heck, it’s basically common sense.

Though the authors also note that other academics have found that “…right-wing politicians maintaining closer ties to representatives of the private sector, which breeds mutual trust and reciprocity, and makes corruption more likely to occur.”

And that sounds plausible as well.

The bottom line is that I’m not convinced that leftist politicians are naturally more corrupt than their right-wing counterparts.

But I definitely agree that corruption gets worse when government plays a bigger role in the economy. And that’s a lesson I wish everyone (on the right and the left) would learn.