How far does democracy decrease corruption? And which specific aspects of democracy help generate such effects? Corruption is famously one of the strongest obstacles to social and economic development. Whereas there has been extensive research identifying the causes of corruption, there is little experimental research on the impact of political institutions on corruption using designs that control for significant confounders. This paper uses a series of laboratory experiments conducted in 2013 Egypt in which a government official decides whether to spend tax revenues paid by subjects on a self-serving good or a good that benefits everyone equally. We have two experimental manipulations: (a) whether the official is electorally accountable to subjects or not; (b) whether subjects could send messages of protests to the official (and one another). We find evidence that electoral accountability does decrease the probability of the official choosing the self-serving good by 17% whereas voice accountability generates such outcome only in the authoritarian treatment (a reduction of corruption by 29%). We also find suggestive evidence that, in the authoritarian treatment, the likelihood of funding the self-serving good decreases by 27% when taxes paid by citizens fall short of the official’s threshold. Our contribution to the literature is two-fold: (a) we are able to single out the effect of specific democratic mechanisms on government corruption; (b) we test outcomes of democratic mechanisms on a traditionally understudied subject pool.

民主能在多大程度上减少腐败？民主的哪些具体方面有助于产生这种效果？众所周知，腐败是社会和经济发展的最大障碍之一。虽然已经有大量研究确定腐败的原因，但很少有使用控制重要混杂因素的设计来研究政治制度对腐败的影响的实验研究。本文使用了 2013 年在埃及进行的一系列实验室实验，在这些实验中，政府官员决定将受试者支付的税收用于自私的商品还是使所有人平等受益的商品。我们有两个实验性操作：（a）官员是否在选举中对臣民负责；(b) 受试者是否可以向官员（和另一人）发送抗议信息。选举问责确实将官员选择自私商品的可能性降低了 17%，而声音问责仅在专制待遇中产生这种结果（腐败减少 29%）。我们还发现暗示性证据表明，在威权主义待遇中，当公民缴纳的税款低于官员的门槛时，为自私商品提供资金的可能性会降低 27%。我们对文献的贡献有两个方面：(a) 我们能够挑出特定民主机制对政府腐败的影响；(b) 我们在传统研究不足的主题库上测试民主机制的结果。