Vote-buying

The direct purchase of a vote, usually in the week before an election, usually delivered to the household by a candidate’s representative.

It is real and it is measured. Pulse Asia found that around the May 2016 national election, 22 percent of Filipinos said they had been offered money or a material thing for their vote, and 76 percent of those offered accepted.

What makes the term worth defining carefully is how easily it slides into a verdict on the seller. The arithmetic is what the course teaches instead. A household with no savings, no insurance and no reliable public service is offered certain cash today by a candidate who will win the seat regardless, against a promise of services from an institution that has not delivered within living memory. Selling is the highest-return option on the table, and refusing is a donation to an outcome already fixed.

The behaviour is real either way, and understanding it does not undo it. What changes is what it is evidence of, and therefore where you would go to stop it.

It also turns out to be tractable. In a field experiment in Sorsogon City, inviting voters to promise not to sell their vote reduced vote-selling, which is not what an immovable cultural trait does. That evidence is taught in Lesson 2.7.

Source: Pulse Asia survey data on the May 2016 elections, reported via Transparency International, “How much is your vote worth?”, free. The framework for reading it is Allen Hicken (2011), “Clientelism,” Annual Review of Political Science, 14, 289 to 310, free PDF. The Sorsogon field experiment is Hicken, Leider, Ravanilla and Yang (2018), Journal of Development Economics, 131, 1 to 14, free working paper.

First used in: 2.3 · Why a decent person sells a vote