Brokering Votes With Information Spread Via Social Networks

Raúl Duarte, Frederico Finan, Horacio Larreguy and Laura Schechter

No 26241, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Throughout much of the developing world, politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes prior to elections. We investigate how social networks help facilitate vote-buying exchanges by combining village network data of brokers and voters with broker reports of vote buying. We show that networks diffuse politically-relevant information about voters to brokers who leverage it to target voters. In particular, we find that brokers target reciprocal voters who are not registered to their party and about whom they can hear more information through their social network. These results highlight the importance of information diffusion through social networks for vote buying and ultimately for political outcomes.

JEL-codes: D72 O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-net, nep-pay, nep-pol and nep-soc
Note: DEV POL
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26241.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Brokering Votes with Information Spread Via Social Networks (2024)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:26241

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w26241

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().