Search

Anti-corruption strategies are more likely to be effective if they take into account not only public officials’ willingness to accept bribes but also citizens’ willingness to offer bribes. However, little is known about the factors that affect citizens’ propensity to engage in bribery. In this project, we employ a paired conjoint experiment to analyze this issue in the context of Ukraine.

In many countries, clientelist parties (or political machines) distribute selective benefits, especially to the poor, in direct exchange for electoral support. Many scholars view clientelism as a political strategy, but fail to distinguish between substantively different patterns of machine politics. Conflating distinct strategies of clientelism poses a serious threat to descriptive and causal inference. This study seeks to increase analytical differentiation of clientelism, building on fieldwork in Brazil, formal modeling, and econometric analyses of survey data.A fundamental, yet frequently overlooked, distinction lies between strategies of electoral and relational clientelism. Whereas electoral clientelism involves elite payoffs to citizens during campaigns, relational clientelism involves ongoing relationships beyond campaigns. Electoral clientelism — the primary focus of this study — delivers all benefits to citizens before voting, and involves the threat of opportunistic defection by citizens. By contrast, relational clientelism delivers at least some benefits to citizens after voting, and involves the threat of opportunistic defection by both citizens and elites. Scholars often conflate vote buying with other strategies of electoral clientelism. Much of what scholars interpret as vote buying (exchanging rewards for vote choices) may actually be turnout buying (exchanging rewards for turnout). This study advances research on clientelism by specifying and testing a mechanism by which parties can distribute benefits to mobilize supporters. Formal modeling suggests that turnout buying is incentive-compatible, and also provides several testable predictions: (1) machines focus rewards on strong supporters, (2) they target the poor, and (3) they offer rewards where they can most effectively monitor turnout. Although both strategies coexist, empirical tests suggest that Argentine survey data are more consistent with turnout buying than vote buying. Two other strategies of electoral clientelism are also frequently conflated with vote buying: double persuasion (exchanging rewards for vote choices and turnout) and negative turnout buying (exchanging rewards for abstention).Formal analysis in Chapter 4 — coauthored with Jordan Gans-Morse and Sebastian Mazzuca — suggests that political machines are most effective when combining multiple strategies of electoral clientelism. Machines adapt the size of clientelist benefits to citizens' political preferences and inclination to vote, and are willing to pay relatively more for vote buying because unlike other strategies it both adds votes for the machine and subtracts votes from the opposition. The model also suggests that machines tailor their mix of electoral clientelism to five characteristics of political environments: (1) compulsory voting, (2) machine support, (3) political polarization, (4) salience of political preferences, and (5) strength of ballot secrecy. The model's predictions are consistent with qualitative evidence from Argentina, Brazil and Russia.

Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ “voter buying” to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits—which undermined voter buying—decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. Consistent with voter buying, these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows, and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows. Findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set.

In this dissertation, I investigate some of the theoretical and empirical puzzles posed by the persistence of clientelist practices in Brazil. As explored in the following Introduction, the competitiveness of the Brazilian electoral system and reports of increased vote buying contrasts with most theoretical explanations for the phenomenon. Chapter Two presents theoretical arguments for why competitiveness changes the nature of clientelist relationships, classifying the phenomenon in traditional and short-term clientelism. Chapter Three analyzes literature about clientelism in different institutional periods of Brazilian history. Chapter Four analyzes electoral volatility; using this new measurement to understand how stable are the connections between federal deputy candidates in Brazil and their city-level electorates. A qualitative analysis offers support to short-term clientelism theory: three selected candidates associated with clientelism and with elevated electoral volatility in 2018 increased their vote shares between elections in municipalities where their precinct-level concentration is higher, suggesting the mechanism of professional brokerage operates as predicted. Chapter Five presents the theoretical implications and methods for the Re-election Candidates Survey. Results show that candidates in a sub-group of participants with high predictability and elevated electoral volatility reported political strategies and displayed voting patterns in accordance with short-term clientelism theory. These results support the claim that this electoral strategy could have been used by a broader set of federal deputy candidates in Brazil during the 2018 elections.