Vote-Buying and Reciprocity

By Frederico Finan, L. Schechter. Social Science Research Network, 2011

480 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/66d37e56f24d0e5e254dc774451c3400208443bf

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Citations in the corpus

Voting to Tell Others (2014, unknown): “[19] Finan, Frederico and Laura Schechter.”
Buying votes vs. supplying public services : political incentives to under-invest in pro-poor policies (2013, background): “…institutions of reciprocity (utang na loob).20 Local political operatives in municipal politics might be particularly well embedded in communities and be able to target vote-buying offers to voters with whom there are norms of reciprocity (as in the mechanism examined by Finan and Schechter, 2011).”
Can Informed Voters Enforce Better Governance? Experiments in Low-Income Democracies (2011, background): “Finan and Schecter (2010) argue that vote-buying is more prevalent among individuals who are more willing to engage in reciprocal behavior.”
Beyond the Machine (2015, background): “Finan and Schechter (2012) find that Paraguayan brokers target “reciprocal” individuals who return favors in a variety of nonelectoral contexts.”