Voter Buying: Shaping the Electorate through Clientelism
Name
Voter_Buying.pdf
Size
5.21 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
39dd8ba064b53d6b9b20b6c846bbd828
Author(s)
Nichter, Simeon
Hidalgo, Fernando Daniel
Date Issued
August 2015
Journal
American Journal of Political Science
Publisher
Wiley Blackwell
Citation
Hidalgo, F. Daniel, and Simeon Nichter. “Voter Buying: Shaping the Electorate through Clientelism.” American Journal of Political Science (August 6, 2015): n/a–n/a.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ “voter buying” to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits—which undermined voter buying—decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. Consistent with voter buying, these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows, and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows. Findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12214
