Legislative Voting Networks and Corruption: The Case of Ukraine

What explains legislative corruption in weakly-institutionalized democracies? I study this question by examining the effect of roll call parliamentary networks on the likelihood of participation in corruption schemes in the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. Ukraine's main legislative body is characterized by weak party discipline, the absence of strong programmatic parties, and a plethora of informal, often hidden connections between legislators. To understand how Ukrainian legislators are linked to one another, I use data on roll call voting to find pairs of legislators who vote identically to each other in more than 95% of cases within a single convocation. These voting "twins" form parliamentary networks within which higher levels of connectedness are associated with lower probability of participation in corruption schemes, most likely due to the increased legislative performance and, thus, visibility to the general public. The study implies that increase in legislative connections and improvement of legislative performance associated with it can reduce legislative corruption in countries with weak democratic institutions.