Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

Mogens Kamp Justesen, Luigi Manzetti

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Abstract

Electoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying—a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. This article examines how clientelist parties’ use of vote buying is jointly shaped by two voter traits: poverty and partisanship. We hypothesize that clientelist parties pursue a mixed strategy, broadly targeting their core voters but also poor swing voters. While most of the existing evidence comes from single-country studies, this study adds cross-national evidence from multilevel regressions of survey data from 22 Latin American countries. Empirically, we find that poverty matters mainly for swing voters. For partisans, the effect of poverty on vote buying is weaker. These results suggest that poverty plays an important role in vote-buying strategies—but also that partisanship moderates clientelistic parties’ vote-buying strategies during electoral campaigns.
Original languageEnglish
JournalLatin American Politics and Society
Volume65
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)1-19
Number of pages19
ISSN1531-426X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2023

Bibliographical note

Published online: 26 May 2023.

Keywords

  • Poverty
  • Partisanship
  • Vote buying
  • Electoral corruption
  • Latin America

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