Despite the salience of corruption in elections in Latin America and beyond, it remains unclear what makes certain candidates attractive to voters as solutions to address corruption. Building on studies about the effect of candidates’ professional affiliation on voting behavior, we hypothesize that police and military officers are perceived to be more competent to address corruption. We test our theoretical expectations through an online survey of Brazilian voters with an image-based factorial experiment that presents respondents with three randomly generated handbills, varying candidates’ professional affiliations and potential confounders, such as economic policy, insider versus outsider status, and demographic features. Our results demonstrate that candidates affiliated with the police or the military are perceived to be more effective at reducing corruption, all else equal. The effect of police or military professions on candidates’ perceived effectiveness to fight corruption varies according to respondents’ ideology and is particularly significant among conservative voters.

中文翻译：

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新的腐败斗士：安全部门的联系作为反腐败投票的启发

尽管拉丁美洲及其他地区的选举中腐败问题十分突出，但目前尚不清楚是什么让某些候选人作为解决腐败问题的解决方案对选民有吸引力。基于候选人专业背景对投票行为影响的研究，我们假设警察和军官被认为更有能力解决腐败问题。我们通过基于图像的析因实验对巴西选民进行在线调查，测试我们的理论预期，该实验向受访者提供三张随机生成的传单、不同候选人的专业背景和潜在的混杂因素，例如经济政策、内部与外部地位以及人口特征。我们的结果表明，在其他条件相同的情况下，警察或军队的候选人被认为在减少腐败方面更有效。警察或军事职业对候选人反腐败有效性的影响因受访者的意识形态而异，在保守派选民中尤其重要。