Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

Abstract

Electoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying—a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. This article examines how clientelist parties’ use of vote buying is jointly shaped by two voter traits: poverty and partisanship. We hypothesize that clientelist parties pursue a mixed strategy, broadly targeting their core voters but also poor swing voters. While most of the existing evidence comes from single-country studies, this study adds cross-national evidence from multilevel regressions of survey data from 22 Latin American countries. Empirically, we find that poverty matters mainly for swing voters. For partisans, the effect of poverty on vote buying is weaker. These results suggest that poverty plays an important role in vote-buying strategies—but also that partisanship moderates clientelistic parties’ vote-buying strategies during electoral campaigns.

Election Campaigns and Vote-Buying in Nigeria: Media Study Perspectives

“…According to Guerra and Justesen, (2022) vote buying represents a political clientelism involving pre-electoral transfers of money or material benefits from candidates to voters especially in developing countries. In Latin America, it is a common practice to deploy vote buying strategies to win over voters during election period and this practice is pervasive in the whole region (Justesen & Manzetti, 2023). Also, there is the use of rent seeking method to win voters in authoritarian countries like China (Ma et al, 2022).…”

“…Voters' inducements, also known as electoral clientelism, are another form of electoral corruption that has become increasingly prevalent in contemporary democracies. These inducements can take various forms, such as direct cash handouts (Lecturer & Chukwuma, 2020), promises of social services or development projects, (Justesen & Manzetti, 2023) employment or patronage, food and material goods, or community and social events (Busia et al, 2021) . Voters' inducements have significant implications for democratic governance.…”