Political Research Quarterly 1–13 © 2016 University of Utah Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1065912916634897 prq.sagepub.com Article In June 2005, an embattled Brazilian legislator revealed that the ruling Partido do Trabalhadores (PT, Worker’s Party) had been paying certain congressional deputies R$30,000 1 every month to secure their support for the government’s legislative initiatives. As the media focused attention on the mensalão (“big monthly payment”) scan- dal over the next six months of 2005, two high-ranking presidential advisers and the president of the PT all resigned, and public opinion toward incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva soured (Hunter and Power 2007). Yet despite the additional resignation in March 2006 of the finance minister, Lula had regained enough ground by October 2006 to capture the plurality of votes in the first round of presidential election and the majority of votes in the second round, in which voters returned him to office for a second four-year term. 2 Arguably, Lula was able to avoid electoral punishment because he himself was never directly implicated in the scandal. In this paper, we ask whether this is emblematic of a more general trend: do citizens punish corruption when the target of corruption allegations is the elected politician himself yet overlook corruption when appointed officials are involved? The answer to this question has important implications for the nature of democratic accountability. In a modern state, much of the work of government is carried out by unelected officials who voters cannot directly sanction. As a result, citizen control of bureaucrats and appointed officials is indirect, at best. To create incentives for unelected officials to faithfully perform the duties of their office, citizens must rely on threats to sanction elected officials for the actions of those unelected officials they oversee. On one hand, this indirect control may be desir- able: if politicians do not fear any electoral sanctions as the result of poor performance by others, they may lack the incentives to control and oversee bureaucrats and administration officials. On the other hand, indirect con- trol has drawbacks for accountability as well. If citizens sanction elected officials to an extreme extent for the behavior of their subordinates, high-performing politi- cians may lose elections for actions that are truly beyond their own control. We hypothesize that citizen punishment of corruption will vary with the target of corruption information. We also hypothesize that punishment will vary with the cred- ibility of that information and with the sophistication of 634897PRQ XX X 10.1177/1065912916634897Political Research QuarterlyWinters and Weitz-Shapiro research-article 2016 1 University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA 2 Brown University, Providence, RI, USA Corresponding Author: Matthew S. Winters, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, 315 David Kinley Hall, MC-713, 1407 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Email: mwinters@illinois.edu Who’s in Charge Here? Direct and Indirect Accusations and Voter Punishment of Corruption Matthew S. Winters 1 and Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro 2 Abstract There is a growing consensus that voters withdraw support from a politician when they receive clear information that the politician has engaged in corruption. But will voters punish an elected official for corrupt acts carried out under his or her watch even if the politician is not personally implicated in corruption? To answer this question, we present the results of an embedded experiment from a nationally representative survey in Brazil. Using vignettes that describe a hypothetical mayor, we find that citizens punish all mayors who are linked to corruption but that punishment is attenuated when members of the municipal administration, and not the mayor per se, are charged with corruption. The difference is particularly pronounced when corruption information comes from a credible source and among politically sophisticated respondents. Our findings highlight that both the nature of information and the characteristics of citizens who receive that information have implications for political accountability. Keywords accountability, corruption, survey experiment, Brazil by guest on February 27, 2016 prq.sagepub.com Downloaded from