Vote Buying, Government Accountability, and Political Corruption: The Case of the Philippines

ABSTRACT : Vote buying and political corruption have been permanent features of the Philippine political landscape. Despite laws that prohibit and punish vote-buying and corruption, these phenomena continue to exist in the Philippines. The implementation of the anti-corrupt practices act in the Philippines is only one of the mechanisms of the government to fight corruption. The study will examine how vote-buying and accountability affect corruption in the Philippines. It will primarily give emphasis on corruption as the effect of vote-buying and accountability using the data provided by the “Varieties of democracy” (V.Dem). The study used Multiple Regression Analysis to model the causal relationship between the explanatory variables; government accountability and vote-buying; and the response variable; political corruption. The results found are striking; there is no correlation between accountability and corruption. In the case of vote-buying and corruption, the study revealed that there is a statistically significant negative linear association between the two

KEYWORDS: accountability, corruption, government, political landscape, vote-buying