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Rulers of modern states consolidated control over territories that were previously complicated mosaics of private political jurisdictions. Systematic information about this process is sparse. This article analyzes village-level transition paths between jurisdictions—royal, seigneurial, and ecclesiastical—in northern Castile in the period 1352–1787. It quantifies how much power different types of lords preserved or lost to the Crown in the long run and also offers conjectural estimates showing that exposure to opportunities for trade led to more resilient and larger royal domains—at the expense of secular lords, but not of the Catholic Church.

Exploiting daily records documenting how an organization of high-level bureaucrats in Argentina collected bribes and delivered them to party leaders from 2009 to 2015, I detect with unprecedented accuracy a political corruption cycle in narrow temporal windows around national elections. Bureaucrats, on average, collected about $350 thousand more in bribes and were 9.6 percentage points more likely to deliver cash to politicians on days within two weeks before elections than within two weeks after elections. These results are puzzling from the perspective of theories of democratic accountability, which predict that corruption should decrease with electoral proximity, but follow naturally when the factor motivating corruption is the need to finance political expenses. This article’s findings confirm that the motivation behind corruption is often to advance political goals rather than personal enrichment, and that competitive elections shape incentives for corruption in more complex ways than traditionally thought.

In this paper, I use a slightly modified version of the Becker–Stigler model of corrupt behavior to explain bureaucratic political involvement. Since bureaucrats prefer higher rewards and not to support losing candidates, we expect them to become politically involved near elections – when rewards are expected to be higher, and information more abundant. Taking advantage of a natural experiment, I employ differences-in-means and differences-in-differences techniques to estimate the effect of electoral proximity on the political involvement of justices of the peace in the city of Buenos Aires in 1904. I find a large, positive, and highly local effect of electoral proximity on their political involvement, with no appreciable impact in the months before or after elections. (author's abstract)