By now, most political systems around the world hold regular multiparty elections of different quality and type. However, we know relatively little about the effect of elections on corruption, especially in high-discretion, public procurement contracts implementing development aid. To address this gap in the literature, we employ unmatched comparisons and matching estimators to analyze a global government contracting dataset that provides an objective proxy for corruption: the incidence of single bidding in competitive markets. We find that, all things being equal, corruption risks increase in the immediate pre-election period: single bidding is higher by 1.3–6.1% points. We demonstrate that the corruption-enhancing effect of elections is stronger under conditions of (i) high electoral competitiveness, (ii) medium-level party institutionalization, and (iii) “localized collective goods” clientelism.