Current research

Recent elections in advanced democracies have seen the survival, and in several cases the return to power, of politicians with serious criminal records. From Donald Trump to Silvio Berlusconi to Benjamin Netanyahu, voters re-elect politicians with criminal pasts, exposing a widening gap between legal and democratic accountability. Yet scholarship has focused on scandals rather than convictions, on financial wrongdoing rather than the wider universe of crimes, and on Western democracies rather than the variation observed globally. We document global voter support for politicians accused of various crimes, using a pre-registered, parallel conjoint experiment conducted in ten democracies (N ≈ 19,000), supplemented by original observational data. The experimental design simultaneously varies eight politician attributes, including crime type, conviction status, and the partisan alignment of the adjudicating judge, allowing us to isolate when, why, and where convictions cease to be politically fatal. We find that certain crimes actually provide electoral bonus rather than punishing them across different societies. The findings speak to the resilience and vulnerabilities of democratic accountability under conditions of judicial contestation.