When Clientelism Backfires: Vote Buying, Democratic Attitudes, and Electoral Retaliation in Latin America

• Author: Ryan E. Carlin,Mason W. Moseley
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211020126
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/10659129211020126

Political Research Quarterly

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129211020126

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Vote buying—the exchange of excludable material goods

for votes—pervades electoral politics in many democra-

cies. Yet converting targeted electoral benefits into votes

is imperfect, creating wide “effectiveness gaps” in some

cases (Kitschelt and Altamirano 2015). Distributive poli-

tics scholars attribute this “leaky bucket” phenomenon

(Dixit and Londregan 1996) to, among other things,

party system dynamics (Kitschelt and Altamirano 2015),

party-broker principal–agent problems (Szwarcberg

2015), and programmatic campaigns (Greene 2021). But

they ignore a potentially integral piece of the puzzle:

voters might actually punish parties that target them for

electoral rewards. Given high electoral volatility (Cohen,

Salles Kobilanski, and Zechmeister 2018; Hicken and

Kuhonta 2015; Riedl 2014), widespread sanctioning of

corrupt politicians (Klašnja, Tucker, and Deegan-Krause

2016; Manzetti and Rosas 2015), and significant rates of

invalid voting in many developing contexts (Cohen

2018; Power and Garand 2007), this thesis warrants due

consideration.

Probing more deeply, we ask: who is most likely to

retaliate against vote buyers, and what retaliatory actions

might they take? We theorize that targeting “demo-

crats”—voters committed to democratic governance and

norms—can fuel acts of negative reciprocity such as vot-

ing against vote-buying parties or casting an invalid

ballot. Results from a case study of Argentina, including

a within-case study of dominant-party provinces, and

regional evidence from Latin America are consistent with

this proposition. Our results are compatible with our pro-

posed causal mechanism: being targeted for vote buying

triggers democrats to retaliate by raising their perceptions

of political corruption.

As such, this study makes several contributions. To the

study of clientelism, it supplements macro-level accounts

of the “leaky bucket” with compelling micro-level theory

and evidence of voter agency. Our findings also comple-

ment the consensus that party operatives seek to target

rewards with surgical precision by showing the high

stakes of propositioning bad targets. Results for negative

reciprocity fit with theories that connect vote buying with

social preferences for positive reciprocity (Finan and

Schechter 2012; Lawson and Greene 2014) and trust

(Rueda, n.d.). And because negative reciprocity is the

workhorse of social norm maintenance in evolutionary

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20126PRQXXX10.1177/10659129211020126Political Research QuarterlyCarlin and Moseley

2

021

1Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

2West Virginia University, Morgantown, USA

Corresponding Author:

Mason W. Moseley, West Virginia University, 316 Woodburn Hall,

P.O. Box 6317, Morgantown, WV 26506-6317, USA.

Email: mwmoseley@mail.wvu.edu

When Clientelism Backfires: Vote

Buying, Democratic Attitudes, and

Electoral Retaliation in Latin America

Ryan E. Carlin1 and Mason W. Moseley2

Abstract

Attempting to buy votes is, in some cases, inefficient and damaging to a clientelistic party. To explain why, we propose

the concept of electoral retaliation: sanctioning clientelistic parties by voting against them or intentionally invalidating

the ballot. These forms of negative reciprocity are meant to uphold the democratic norms—equal participation,

popular sovereignty, electoral fairness—that vote buying undermines. Electoral retaliation is, we theorize, the domain

of “democrats.” Thus, we expect voters who highly value democratic norms to be most likely to retaliate against

vote-buying parties. We test our theory’s observable implications with a research design that pairs case study and

subnational evidence from Argentina with cross-national evidence from Latin America. Results are consistent with the

notion that when clientelistic parties target democrats, it is likely to backfire on the machine. Our analyses examine

multiple indicators of democratic support, explore causal mechanisms, conduct placebo tests, and seek to rule out

various forms of selection bias.

Keywords

clientelism, vote buying, political behavior, democratic attitudes, prosocial norms, Latin America

2022, Vol. 75(3) 766–781

Article

Carlin and Moseley 767

models of prosociality (Bowles and Gintis 2011; Henrich

et al. 2006), electoral retaliation to maintain democratic

norms is precisely what this line of theorizing would

predict.

To the study of accountability, electoral retaliation

represents a new form of sanctioning. Social contract

theorists such as Locke, Mill, and the Federalists argue

sanctioning—rewarding or punishing elected officials

with the ballot—promotes accountability. Voters elector-

ally retaliate to hold elected officials to account not for

poor representation or performance but, rather, for violat-

ing fundamental democratic norms of electoral fairness,

political equality, and popular sovereignty. Electoral

retaliation thus parallels research on the electoral effects

of violating other democratic norms, such as corruption

(e.g., Manzetti and Rosas 2015) and electoral integrity

(e.g., Norris 2014).

Below, we identify an undercurrent of moral disgust

with vote buying in prior work before presenting our the-

ory of electoral retaliation. From there, we describe our

multipronged empirical strategy and test our theory’s

observable implications. Each stage of our analysis offers

strong support for the key predictions of our theory.

Results pass multiple robustness tests. Our conclusion

discusses this study’s theoretical contributions.

Who Rejects Vote Buying?

Building clientelistic networks around patronage and

vote buying is a venerable method of linking political

parties to voters (see review in Mares and Young 2016).

Yet its effectiveness varies and even fails among certain

classes of voters, for various reasons. A common thread

is that vote buying offends some citizens’ democratic

sensibilities.

Of the many accounts focused on wealth, some hinge

on logics orthogonal to citizens’ underlying democratic

orientations, such as the rich rejecting vote buying because

of low marginal returns (Dixit and Londregan 1996) or the

poor who are excluded from clientelism punishing clien-

telistic parties (Mares and Young 2019). And machine

parties diversify their electoral strategies to deliver

concrete policies to affluent voters and “non-policy”

material inducements to poorer constituents (Calvo and

Murillo 2019). But attitudinal factors are implicit in other

socioeconomic accounts that suggest vote buying may be

offensive to some classes of voters. When targeting poor

voters, one Argentine broker interviewed by Zarazaga

(2014, 10) notes, “You have to help the poor but be careful

not to make it look like clientelism. Nobody likes being

used.” Parties may also avoid targeting middle-class vot-

ers for fear of reprisal because they view clientelism as a

red flag for governance (Weitz-Shapiro 2014). Democratic

values may, thus, underlie the expected reactions of both

the poor and the middle class.

More explicitly, information theories highlight that

support for democratic norms, ideals, and governance can

undermine vote buying (F. C. Schaffer 2007). Civic edu-

cation campaigns and greater voter sophistication reduce

the effectiveness of vote buying in Taiwan (Fox 1994), as

do leaflets exhorting citizens to vote their conscience,

even if they accept electoral benefits in São Tomé and

Príncipe (Vicente 2014). The twin rise of newspapers and

literacy in Britain and the United States allowed political

parties to make programmatic appeals to the masses

(Stokes et al. 2013), and these dynamics have also trans-

formed would-be clients into autonomous voters in

Mexico (Greene 2021). Formal education undercuts vote

buying because “[v]oters with higher levels of education

are better equipped to see the system-level problems and

have access to more sources of political information dis-

cussing the societal costs of vote buying” (Gonzalez

Ocantos, Kiewiet de Jonge, and Nickerson 2014, 201).

Vote buying thus carries a “social stigma” for the most

educated voters because they know its pernicious, if

abstract, social and democratic effects (ibid).

Negative normative or moral reactions to the perver-

sion of democratic norms and governance are common

denominators to these and related studies (e.g., Carreras

and İrepoğlu 2013). Vicente (2014, 385) claims anti-vote

buying campaigns work due to an “increase in voting

in good conscience.” Most Nigerians, Bratton (2008, 1)

posits, regard vote selling as an “[infraction] of public

morality.” F. C. Schaffer and Schedler (2007, 16) argue

that some Latin Americans see vote buying offers as

an affront; “to accept an offer would damage ones’ self-

respect.” And Weitz-Shapiro (2014) links moral repug-

nance to wealthier Argentines’ rejection of clientelistic

parties. Kitschelt and Kselman (2013, 1459) even predict

that as democracy and party competition stabilize,

more voters will begin to take offense at the political

inequality resulting from clientelism, namely, that those

with access to large-scale state or private resources can

commandeer vast numbers of votes, voiding the regulative

democratic fiction of “one voter, one vote.”

In sum, vote trafficking contradicts some voters’ concep-

tions of democratic citizenship.

Electoral Retaliation as Democratic

Norm Maintenance

If this tension between vote trafficking and democratic

citizenship translates into a sense of vengeance, it should

have important behavioral implications. Specifically,

support for democratic norms and governance may con-

dition voter reactions to electoral incentives and, in turn,

fuel retaliatory voting behavior. Building to such a the-

ory, we conceptualize electoral retaliation and describe