This article appears in the following Oxford Review of Economic Policy issue: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF DEVELOPMENT [View the issue table of contents]
Clientelism and vote buying: lessons from field experiments in African elections
* Trinity College Dublin; CSAE, University of Oxford; and BREAD, e-mail: vicentep{at}tcd.ie
** New York University, e-mail: leonard.wantchekon{at}nyu.edu
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Abstract |
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Electoral clientelism and vote buying are widely perceived as major obstacles to economic development. This is because they may limit the provision of public goods. In this paper, we review the literature on clientelism and vote buying and propose the use of field experiments to evaluate empirically the consequences of these phenomena. We provide an overview, discuss implementation, and interpret the main results of recent field experiments conducted by the authors in West African countries. Clientelism and vote buying seem to be effective and to enjoy widespread electoral support. The results suggest that increased access to information and political participation by women may limit clientelism. In addition, voter education campaigns may undermine the effects of vote buying on voting behaviour. We argue that our findings may inform the design of development aid interventions, as a way effectively to increase public-good political accountability. We also discuss directions for fruitful future research.
Key Words: clientelism • vote buying • field experiment • West Africa
We thank Chris Adam, Nic Cheeseman, Adrienne LeBas, an anonymous referee, and a plenary audience at the CSAE Conference, University of Oxford, for useful comments.
1 See Lemarchand (1972) and Bayart (1994).
2 Note that all electoral competition games relate to the Colonel Blotto game (see Roberson (2006) for a review), where two opposing parties simultaneously allocate forces among a finite number of battles. Each battle is won by the party that allocated a larger force in that specific front. The overall winner is the party that wins a majority of the battles.
3 These patterns are consistent with the historical studies of Cox and Kousser (1981), Cox (1987), for late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain and the USA. These authors report that before secret ballots were introduced in these countries, upfront vote buying was widespread and consisted of small amounts of money being offered to voters.
4 ‘Field’ stands for maintaining the natural conditions of the real world, in opposition to ‘laboratory’ or ‘controlled’ experiments, where stylized games are played and the pay-off structure is constructed by the researcher.
5 More standard techniques range from careful wording of the questions to controlling for interviewer fixed effects. It is worth noting that recent work in developing countries has seen a number of measurement innovations originating from other social sciences such as psychology—see Green and Paluck (2008) for an example, where focus group discussions were analysed quantitatively.
6 Since the baseline measurement of vote buying (in the pre-election survey) concerned an anterior date (the relevant questions were asked about the 2006 parliamentary elections, which had taken place approximately three months before), and provided the leaflet was shown/discussed to/with the respondent just before asking about vote buying in the pre-election survey, Vicente (2007) is able to measure conformity bias, as the difference between treatment and control at the baseline.
7 Note that community-level promises may be made conditional on community-level electoral results. This type of clientelism is therefore enforceable as is the (individual-voter) prominent ‘public-sector job’ example.
8 Note also that, historically, a disproportionately high proportion of African elections featured incumbents winning (see Bratton, 1998). This fact (the frequent expectation that the incumbent will win) may add to the incumbent advantage in undertaking clientelism at any specific election.
9 This finding, revealing that vote buying is, indeed, driving voters, is consistent with earlier work by Brusco et al. (2004) in Argentina. Note, however, that their observational findings are based on direct survey questions about the effectiveness of vote buying.
10 This finding provides reassuring evidence about the proposed mechanism of the experiment in the sense that subjects that were a priori taken as more exposed to vote buying—see evidence by Brusco et al., 2004—constituted the realized active targets of the campaign.
11 Collier and Vicente (2008) also present evidence that this is the case. Specifically in Nigeria, for the 2007 round of federal and state-level elections, it was found that the incumbents were mainly using clientelism and fraud (given their control of state resources and bodies), while marginal challengers were using violence and intimidation.
12 Indeed, Vicente (2007) finds that rural locations are more prone to vote buying, which implies that enforcement may be easier in these settings (where people are less anonymous).
13 Note that, in the case of Sao Tome and Principe, the presence of both main-candidate vote-buyers is reported to be statistically similar (by the surveyed respondents) in terms of location coverage. This fact leads us to infer that, even in absolute terms, the incumbent does not seem to gain from vote buying.
14 There are, indeed, several reports in Sao Tome and Principe that voting was undertaken in public gatherings in some rural locations, cameras were used to photograph filled ballot papers, pre-filled papers were substituted for genuine ballot papers (with the genuine papers serving as proof of the agreed
substitution), and known opponents’ identity cards were bought before the election day (to prevent those citizens from voting). These phenomena are, however, reported to be statistically unimportant in Vicente (2007).
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