Revise & Resubmit at the Review of Economic Studies

 

Politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes throughout much of the developing world. We investigate how social networks facilitate these vote-buying exchanges. Our model suggests that brokers should be particularly well-placed within the network to learn about non-copartisans’ reciprocity in order to target transfers effectively. As a result, parties should recruit brokers who are central among non-copartisans. We combine village network data from brokers and citizens with broker reports of vote buying. We show that networks diffuse politically-relevant information about citizens to brokers who leverage it to target transfers. In particular, among those citizens who are not registered to their party, brokers target reciprocal citizens about whom they can learn more through their network. Moreover, recruited brokers are significantly more central than other citizens among non-copartisans, but not among copartisans. These results highlight the importance of information diffusion through social networks for vote buying, broker recruitment, and ultimately for political outcomes. 

Do leaders court or cut the entourage of sidelined elites during economic crises? We look at the case of Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s former Oil Czar, who was purged from Chavismo’s Cabinet in late 2014. We find that Ramirez-affiliated individuals and firms became discretely less likely to receive government appointments and contracts upon his purge. Effects on appointments are greatest for high-spending agencies, and firms affiliated with the military and with Nicolas Maduro gained access to government contracts. Downstream agents seem to share the fortunes of their patrons after coalition-shaping policies induced by worsening economic conditions.

Does poll workers' partisanship affect electoral outcomes? Many countries use partisan and adversarial vote-counting systems where poll workers are party representatives and mutual control is expected to provide fairness. Yet in countries with dominant party regimes, parties often have de facto unequal capacities to send representatives to all booths. Exploiting as-if random assignment of voters to booths in Paraguay's 2018 general elections, we estimate that partisan poll workers decrease an opposing party's vote share by up to 2 percentage points (pp) and increase theirs by up to 1 pp. Our analyses also demonstrate how incentives for electoral manipulation vary by electoral system. Dominant parties' poll workers collude against smaller parties more often in proportional representation races. In contrast, single-winner plurality voting yields less collusion because the winner-take-all aspect of these races hampers collusion. Our results have practical implications for politicians and policymakers, and theoretical implications for elections in developing democracies.