Who Receives Electoral Gifts? It Depends on Question Wording: Experimental Evidence from Mexico

Cornejo, Rodrigo Castro; Beltrán, Ulises

doi:10.1007/s11109-020-09618-1

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 30 publications

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“…In Latin America, too, accounts of how party machines mobilize the votes of poor citizens by dispensing particularistic benefits abound. This is documented in the case of Argentina (Auyero 2001; Calvo and Murillo 2004; Dinatale 2004; Stokes 2005; Nichter 2008; Weitz-Shapiro 2012; Murillo et al 2021), Brazil (Zucco 2013), Colombia (Rueda 2017), Guatemala (González-Ocantos et al 2020); Mexico (Fox 1994; Magaloni 2006; Díaz-Cayeros et al 2015; Castro Cornejo and Beltrán 2020), Paraguay (Finan and Schechter 2012), Peru (Schady 2000; Gans-Morse et al 2014), and Venezuela (Kornblith 2002; Penfold-Becerra 2008).…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 97%

Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

Justesen¹,

Manzetti²

2023

Lat Am Polit Soc

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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.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 97%

Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

Justesen¹,

Manzetti²

2023

Lat Am Polit Soc

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

Hatz,

Fjelde,

Randahl

2023

Qual Quant

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List experiments encourage survey respondents to report sensitive opinions they may prefer not to reveal. But, studies sometimes find that respondents admit more readily to sensitive opinions when asked directly. Often this over-reporting is viewed as a design failure, attributable to inattentiveness or other nonstrategic error. This paper conducts an exploratory analysis of such a ‘failed’ list experiment measuring vote buying in the 2019 Nigerian presidential election. We take this opportunity to explore our assumptions about vote buying. Although vote buying is illegal and stigmatized in many countries, a significant literature links such exchanges to patron-client networks that are imbued with trust, reciprocity and long-standing benefits, which might create incentives for individuals to claim having been offered to participate in vote buying. Submitting our data to a series of tests of design, we find that over-reporting is strategic: respondents intentionally reveal vote buying and it’s likely that those who reveal vote buying have in fact being offered to participate in vote buying. Considering reasons for over-reporting such as social desirability and network benefits, and the strategic nature of over-reporting, we suggest that “design failure" is not the only possible conclusion from unexpected list experiment results. With this paper we show that our theoretical assumptions about sensitivity bias affect the conclusions we can draw from a list experiment.

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Why Do Clientelist Brokers Go Rogue? Parties, Politicians, and Intermediaries in Mexico

Langston¹,

Cornejo²

2022

Perspect. polit.

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Political scientists working on clientelism have become interested in the relationships between brokers and the politicians and parties for whom they work. In most of this research, brokers are seen as inherently disloyal and normally act against the interests of their patrons, unless monitoring efforts are enacted. In contrast, we argue that territorial brokers have strong incentives to construct long-term, dependent relationships with their patrons, which diminishes the likelihood of cheating, while their patrons also wish to maintain durable ties with brokers to hold an assured voter base. We argue that politicians prefer brokers who have a good reputation for providing their voters with goods and assuring their votes. Still, sometimes brokers go rogue and cheat on their bosses. This study, which is based on more than fifty in-depth interviews with both local politicians and brokers in Mexico City, examines the conditions under which brokers remain loyal and those that promote cheating. We identify two factors that explain this variation—electoral competitiveness and the level of resource autonomy between brokers and politicians. Non-autonomous brokers working under conditions of low competition tend to have high probabilities of remaining loyal, while independent brokers working under high competitiveness will often resort to cheating.

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Who Receives Electoral Gifts? It Depends on Question Wording: Experimental Evidence from Mexico

Cited by 5 publications

References 30 publications

Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

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

Why Do Clientelist Brokers Go Rogue? Parties, Politicians, and Intermediaries in Mexico

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