I sell my vote, and so what? Incidence, social bias, and correlates of clientelism in Colombia

Leopoldo Fergusson, Carlos Molina and Juan Riano

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Exchanging one’s vote for particularistic benefits—practices usually grouped under clientelism—is often thought to weaken programmatic links between citizens and politicians and disincentivize public good provision, as well as undermine voter autonomy and the ideal role of elections. However, empirically analyzing this key phenomenon for the working of democracies entails formidable challenges. We conduct list experiments on a large sample of households to estimate the incidence of clientelistic vote buying, as well as the extent to which respondents refrain from openly recognizing this behavior. Nearly one out of every five respondents engage in clientelism, and, surprisingly, they do not feel ashamed to admit it. Guided by the existing literature and systematically verifying the sensitivity of the results to model specification, we examine the robust correlates of clientelism and discuss the implications of our key findings.

Keywords: clientelism; vote buying; social desirability bias; list experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C80 C93 D72 D73 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Economía, 2018, 19(1), pp. 181 - 218. ISSN: 1529-7470

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/123150/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: I Sell My Vote, and So What? Incidence, Social Bias, and Correlates of Clientelism in Colombia (2018)
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:ehl:lserod:123150

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().