Brokers, Social Networks, Reciprocity, and Vote-buying in the Philippines

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

Abstract

Scholars have documented a variety of ways and the varying degrees of success with which parties and candidates engage in the clientelistic exchange. What explains this diversity of strategies and the extent to which they are successfully employed? The literature on clientelism has approached this question in two ways. The first strand stresses the different characteristics of the voters as the motive for employing a wide variety of targeting strategies. A second, newer literature emphasizes the network and community structures within which this targeting takes place and how it facilitates monitoring and enforcement of the clientelistic exchange. While these two classes of explanations have each and separately contributed to our understanding of clientelism, we have yet to fully articulate a framework for understanding how they interact to shape the strategies that parties and candidates employ. Moreover, while both classes of explanation recognize the key role that brokers play in the political exchange of private inducements for votes, neither addresses some of the questions that are fundamental to our understanding of the role that brokers play: Who becomes a broker? How well do they know the voters? Who do they target? How effectively can they monitor voter behavior at the polls? We present a framework for understanding how the interaction between network structures and the characteristics of voters shape the targeting strategy different candidates employ, determine who becomes a broker and the roles that they play, and influence voter attitudes and behavior at the polls. We then test the predictions of this framework with a trove of data collected from surveys of voters and brokers before and after a local election in the Philippines.

Authors

• Nico Ravanilla, University of California San Diego

• Dotan A Haim, University of California, San Diego

• Allen D. Hicken, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor