List Experiments, Political Sophistication, and Vote Buying: Experimental Evidence from Mexico

Abstract

This research conducted list experiments to estimate the percentage of respondents who received electoral gifts during the 2015 legislative and the 2015 and 2017 subnational campaigns in Mexico. Consistent with recent studies on sensitive survey techniques, our research finds that list experiments seem to methodologically work better among more sophisticated voters (e.g. those with higher levels of education). Such findings suggest that previous studies that rely on list experiments tend to underestimate the percentage of voters who receive electoral gifts since this technique tends to work better among respondents who are, in fact, least likely to be targeted by clientelistic strategies. Given levels of education in the region, we suggest that research solely relying on list experiments approach its empirical findings with caution.

When Clientelism Backfires: Vote Buying, Democratic Attitudes, and Electoral Retaliation in Latin America

“…5Filter items that include the phrase “in return for your vote” may frustrate gauging, in a follow-up item, the acceptance of electoral rewards by creating problems of social desirability and recall (Castro Cornejo and Beltrán 2020). We doubt the severity of these issues for our study on the following grounds.…”

Could vote buying be socially desirable? Exploratory analyses of a ‘failed’ list experiment

“…Further, 4 of these 12 studies revealed marginally higher prevalence levels in a direct measure, although this over-reporting is not statistically significant. However, as list experiment practitioners have noted, there is a tendency for scholars with null or unexpected list experiment results not to pursue publication, ultimately leading to a file-drawer problem which may slant evidence from meta-analyses (Blair et al (2020(Blair et al ( , p. 1306, Kramon and Weghorst (2019, p. 239), Castro Cornejo and Beltrán (2020, p. 224), (Castro Cornejo and Beltrán 2022, p. 10), Gelman (2014). In the context of vote buying in particular, the assumption that vote buying should be under-reported may cause a kind of confirmation bias where evidence suggesting no sensitivity bias or over-reporting is dismissed and evidence suggesting under-reporting is over-emphasized.…”

“…In addition to our measures of vote buying, we used survey questions on demographic characteristics to construct control variables for our analysis. Drawing on prior related research, we control for age, gender, college education and employment (e.g., Gonzalez-Ocantos et al 2012;Carkoglu and Aytaç 2015;Castro Cornejo and Beltrán 2020). We additionally include an indicator of whether the respondent is a registered voter, since registered-and non-registered voters received different survey questions.…”

Gifts for votes? Vote buying as a predictor of turnout in Latin America

“…The findings show that this technique works better with educated voters who are not often the target of vote buying than with the less-educated electorate. Research using list experiments should, therefore, approach empirical findings with caution (Castro Cornejo & Beltrán, 2020).…”