Unpacking Corruption: The Effect of Veto Players on State Capture and Bureaucratic Corruption

Unpacking corruption has advantages over using aggregate measures of corruption when theory generates different predictions about the effects of political institutions on different kinds of corruption. We take advantage of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance surveys conducted in 1999, 2002, and 2005 to investigate the effect of veto players on state capture and bureaucratic corruption in the postcommunist countries. According to our results, a greater number of veto players is associated with less state capture. By contrast, the number of veto players does not have a significant impact on bureaucratic corruption.