Which Presidency Is More Vulnerable To Corruption?

It is commonlyargued that presidency is more vulnerable to corruption than parliamentary system 1. This is because a president has more centralized control over government and sources of corruption than a prime minister (Kunicova and Rose-Ackerman 2005). Then, why do some countries under presidency suffer from a president’s corruption while others don’t? As presidency is widely accepted in countries ofLatin America and Africa, regional comparative studies address the question ofwhy presidential corruption is rampant. Studies of Latin America suggests that corruption of a president is attributed to Hyper-presidentialism, which is defined as a system of government in which a strong president faces limited institutional and popular checks and balances on its actions (Whitehead 1983, 2000). Studies of Africa, on the other hand, attribute presidential corruption to characteristics of emerging independent governments in Africa (Sandbrook1993, Szeftel 2000). Sandbrook (1993)
So, when the governments were forced to create some rules on their own, presidents chose instead to foster their own personal legitimacy by building patron-client ties with a tribalized peasantry. This legitimacy eventually makes corruption easy to be perpetrated (Szeftel 2000). Although aforementioned studies are all meaningful in terms of describing how presidents become corrupt in specific regions, they provide limited insights on why there exists variation of corruption within the presidency generally. In this paper, I offer a generalized theory in a way that suggest presidential term-limit affects corruption. It is based on the argument that president who’s term is not limited have reelection incentives