How Voters View Payoffs: Vote-Buying Attempts in Turkey’s 2011 General Election

• In Event: Vote Buying and Partisan Competition in the Developing World

Abstract

Vote buying (distinct from turnout buying) only works if the provision of selective benefits coverts voters who would not support the machine without payoffs into machine supporters on Election Day. In contrast to the instrumentalist underpinning of current theory about vote buying, we argue that the impact of payoffs is colored by voters’ non-clientelist utility for the machine such as partisanship, issue positions, and evaluations of candidate characteristics. Loyalists, who prefer the machine for non-clientelist reasons, react positively to payoffs, perhaps believing that the machine cares about their wellbeing. Opposition voters who prefer the challenger’s non-clientelist appeals react negatively, perhaps feeling insulted at the machine’s attempt to bribe. Most current theory argues that machines should target swing voters, but they react coolly in the aggregate. Thus, although payoffs are theoretically necessary and sufficient to win swing voter support, these voters’ lack of responsiveness means that the machine struggles to convert them into supporters. Our findings show that reception bias undermines modern vote buying, limiting success to the subset of targeted swing voters without strong non-clientelist attachments. Data come from a list experiment embedded in the Turkey 2011 Panel Study and methods include the use of a new statistical methodology that uses data from list experiments as explanatory variables in outcome regression models.

Authors

• Kenneth F. Greene, University of Texas, Austin

• S. Erdem Aytaç, Koç University

• Ali Carkoglu