Abstract:
We re-analyze Szakonyi (2025), one of the most innovative corruption studies in recent years. Using data from Russia, Szakonyi (2025) estimates the effect of a political regime having compromising information (kompromat) over its politicians on legislative behavior, lobbying, and re-election. We are able to computationally reproduce the author's results, but we had to make changes to the data cleaning script for it to run properly. While one of our robustness tests weakens the author's results, most of our additional tests strengthen or confirm Szakonyi's (2025) original findings. Finally, we provide a discussion of estimands and generalizability that does not invalidate Szakonyi's (2025) findings. Overall, Szakonyi (2025) deserves wide readership and praise for its innovative methods of studying corruption in an authoritarian regime.
