Related Papers
Vote Buying and Social Desirability Bias: Experimental Evidence from Nicaragua
Carlos Meléndez, Ezequiel Gonzalez Ocantos
Qualitative studies of vote buying find the practice to be common in many Latin American countries, but quantitative studies using surveys find little evidence of vote buying. Social desirability bias can account for this discrepancy. We employ a survey-based list experiment to minimize the problem. After the 2008 Nicaraguan municipal elections, we asked about vote-buying behavior by campaigns using a list experiment and the questions traditionally used by studies of vote buying on a nationally representative survey. Our list experiment estimated that 24% of registered voters in Nicaragua were offered a gift or service in exchange for votes, whereas only 2% reported the behavior when asked directly. This detected social desirability bias is nonrandom and analysis based on traditional obtrusive measures of vote buying is unreliable. We also provide systematic evidence that shows the importance of monitoring strategies by parties in determining who is targeted for vote buying. C lientelistic electoral linkages are characterized by a transaction of political favors in which politicians offer immediate material incentives to citizens or groups in exchange for electoral support. 1 Vote buying, which is a more particularized form of clien-telism involving the exchange of goods for votes at the individual level (Stokes 2007), has generated numerous ethnographies and surveys to measure its incidence and test-related hypotheses. While qualitative research routinely finds vote buying to be pervasive in the developing world (e.g., Auyero 2001), individual-level surveys often uncover low levels of such exchanges (e.g., Transparency
When Do Voters Punish Corrupt Politicians? Experimental Evidence from Brazil
2010 •
yuri kasahara
Comparative Political Studies
The Influence of Party Systems on Citizens’ Perceptions of Corruption and Electoral Response in Latin America
2004 •
Roderic Camp
Do Voters Have Different Attitudes toward Corruption? The Sources and Implications of Popular Perceptions and Tolerance of Political Corruption
Nicholas Kerr
Political tolerance and political perceptions are analytically in distinguishable in current literature. In reality, however, individual attitudes toward political corruption are complicated and contingent on myriad factors . This paper makes an important conceptual distinction between perceptions and tolerance of corruption, and argues that voters form their attitudes toward corruption based upon their insider or outsider status. More specifically, we draw the distinction between insiders and outsiders along two dimensions: cost-benefit instrumentality and affective identity. The former refers to whether a voter belongs to the patronage network of the incumbent , and we posit that a patronage-insider is more tolerant of corruption and perceives corruption at a higher level compared to patronage outsiders. On the other hand, affective identity involves whether one shares a partisan or ethnic affiliation with the incumbent. Importantly, we argue that voters view corruption through the lens of identity, and that partisan and ethnic insiders are more likely to turn a blind eye to corruption. Finally, we argue that insiders’ electoral support of the incumbent is less affected by the consequences of corruption. We test our insider-outsider framework , as well as its implications for voting behavior, using recent Afrobarometer data on 18 sub-Saharan African democracies and find fairly strong evidence to support our hypotheses.
Journal of Peace Research
Carrots and sticks: Experimental evidence of vote-buying and voter intimidation in Guatemala
Carlos Meléndez
How do parties target intimidation and vote-buying during elections? Parties prefer the use of carrots over sticks because they are in the business of getting voters to like them and expect higher legitimacy costs if observers expose intimidation. However, their brokers sometimes choose intimidation because it is cheaper and possibly more effective than vote-buying. Specifically, we contend that brokers use intimidation when the cost of buying votes is prohibitively high; in interactions with voters among whom the commitment problem inherent to clientelistic transactions is difficult to overcome; and in contexts where the risk of being denounced for violence is lower. We probe our hypotheses about the different profile of voters targeted with vote-buying and intimidation using two list experiments included in an original survey conducted during the 2011 Guatemalan general elections. The list experiments were designed to overcome the social desirability bias associated with direct qu...
Clientelism as Persuasion-Buying: Evidence from Latin America
Andy Baker
Colombia Internacional
Bribing and Social Desirability in Peru: A Mixed Methods Approach
2022 •
Revista Colombia Internacional
Objective/Context: What could lead some individuals to be more prone to lie about engaging in corruption? We contend that a psychological approach to the study of corruption can be employed to understand who lies about corrupt behavior and why. Since social desirability bias (SDB) is related to the appropriateness of behavior, conflicting social norms in a context where corruption is widespread— like in several Latin American countries—can result in SDB in the context of surveys that directly ask for past corrupt behavior. Moreover, due to conflicting norms, some subgroups of the population might be particularly affected by SDB. Methodology: Together, focus groups, list experiments, and survey data provide evidence that supports our psychological approach. Conclusion: Overall, we confirm that SDB is at work even in a context in which corruption is widespread like Peru. Statistically speaking, we only find evidence in support of the existence of gender socialization as an important source of SDB when directly reporting past bribing behavior in Peru. However, other substantive—not statistically significant—differences related to age merit further discussion and research. Originality: This work has two main contributions; first, it highlights the importance designing unobtrusive measures when studying the prevalence of corrupt practices in Latin America; and second, it shows that policy interventions to fight corruption may not be equally effective across different groups of the population.
Social Norms in Corruption: A Bribery Experiment
2019 •
tatyana zhuravleva
" Who Doesn't? " —The Impact of Descriptive Norms on Corruption
Paul Van Lange, Paul A. M. Van Lange, Nils Köbis
Corruption poses one of the major societal challenges of our time. Considerable advances have been made in understanding corruption on a macro level, yet the psychological antecedents of corrupt behavior remain largely unknown. In order to explain why some people engage in corruption while others do not, we explored the impact of descriptive social norms on corrupt behavior by using a novel behavioral measure of corruption. We conducted three studies to test whether perceived descriptive norms of corruption (i.e. the belief about the prevalence of corruption in a specific context) influence corrupt behavior. The results indicated that descriptive norms highly correlate with corrupt behavior—both when measured before (Study 1) or after (Study 2) the behavioral measure of corruption. Finally, we adopted an experimental design to investigate the causal effect of descriptive norms on corruption (Study 3). Corrupt behavior in the corruption game significantly drops when participants receive short anti-corruption descriptive norm primes prior to the game. These findings indicate that perceived descriptive norms can impact corrupt behavior and, possibly, could offer an explanation for inter-personal and inter-cultural variation in corrupt behavior in the real world. We discuss implications of these findings and draw avenues for future research.
Comparative Politics
Lacking Information or Condoning Corruption: When Do Voters Support Corrupt Politicians?
2013 •
Rebecca Weitz-shapiro, Matthew Winters
What explains persistent political corruption in many young democracies? Focusing on the effects of corruption on individual-level attitudes, we present two hypotheses for why citizens might cast their ballots for corrupt politicians. On the one hand, voters may simply lack information about corruption. On the other hand, voters may knowingly overlook corruption when politicians otherwise perform well in office, delivering public goods to their constituents. We test these hypotheses using an embedded experiment in a nationwide survey in Brazil. The survey finds that the vast majority of voters express a willingness punish corrupt politicians, regardless of politician performance. High income voters form a partial exception to this overall rejection of corruption. Our findings imply that specific, credible, and accessible information will lead most voters to punish corrupt politicians at the polls.
