Small Aggregates, Big Manipulation: Vote Buying Enforcement and Collective Monitoring

Vote buying is widespread in developing democracies despite the secret ballot. What explains its resilience? I argue that brokers condition future payments on published electoral results to enforce these transactions and that this is effective at inducing voters' compliance only when the result...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:American journal of political science 2017-01, Vol.61 (1), p.163-177
Main Author: Rueda, Miguel R.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ballots
Citizens
Compliance
Corruption in government
Democracy
Election results
Electoral results
Enforcement
Identification
Manipulation
Payments
Political science
Public opinion surveys
Resilience
Transactions
Voter fraud
Voters
Voting
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Vote buying is widespread in developing democracies despite the secret ballot. What explains its resilience? I argue that brokers condition future payments on published electoral results to enforce these transactions and that this is effective at inducing voters' compliance only when the results of small voting groups are available. Using monitors' and citizens' reports of electoral manipulation and survey data from Colombia, I find a robust negative correlation between the average polling station size and various measures of vote buying. Evidence from a variety of identification strategies suggests that this relationship can be attributed to aggregate monitoring sustaining these transactions and not to the brokers' increased ability to identify compliers or other characteristics of places where polling stations are small.
ISSN:0092-5853
1540-5907
DOI:10.1111/ajps.12260