Buying Votes across Borders? A Survey Experiment on Mexican Immigrants in the US

• In Event: Comparative Latin American Politics: Short-term Dynamics and Long-term Processes

Abstract

Does vote buying occur within a national territory exclusively? Or do office-seeking politicians attempt to buy votes of expatriates if the right of oversees voting is extensively assured? In the past decades, there has been an increasing number of studies which address why and how the practice of vote buying has prevailed in new democracies in particular. Assuming that politicians or party leaders, party brokers, and voters trade material benefits or promises for political support through dense social networks, the recent works shed light on the mechanisms by which this invisible transaction proliferates.
　　　
On the theoretical front, formal models have been proposed to explain vote buying as an adverse selection problem (Stokes et al. 2013), a collective action problem between them (Camp 2017), and a moral hazard problem (Larreguy et al. 2016), which occur between parties and brokers. On the empirical front, a list experiment is employed to more accurately infer the frequency of vote buying that respondents may have experienced, because this method allows for minimizing the social desirability bias which typically complicates a survey with sensitive questions (Gonzáles-Ocantos et al. 2012). Despite such remarkable progress of theoretical and empirical sides, their focus is confined to domestic political arena, and scant attention has been paid to the possibility of expanding this political practice abroad.
　　　
We argue that previous work overlooked the salience of political network which has been established by the increasing flow of immigrants, who may eventually influence the politics of both sending and receiving countries. Electoral politics, which is typically analyzed in a domestic arena, may also travel across borders. Specifically, we predict that politicians of a sending country attempt to buy votes across borders especially when in the country this practice has traditionally prevailed. There are compelling reasons to support this claim. First, overseas voting typically use postal and internet voting, which are less likely monitored and subject to official sanctioning mechanisms. This is because the law of a sending country is hardly enforceable within a receiving country’s jurisdiction. Second, as a part of democratization process, many new democracies have extended the rights of voting abroad. Under intensified electoral pressure, politicians of those countries may have an incentive to mobilize expatriates’ votes as well. Third, immigrants keep connected to family, friends, communities, and local politicians in a sending country. The presence of transnational network may facilitate a transaction between votes and personal favors at the time of elections.
　　　
We attempt to test the validity of these arguments by conducting a list experiment of Mexican immigrants in the USA. In Mexico, vote buying is wide spread. In addition, Mexico implemented the political-electoral reform in 2014 with a special focus on the extension of voting rights to Mexicans living abroad. The reform has allowed Mexican immigrants to obtain voter registration card outside of Mexico, to cast a ballot by less costly postal voting, but the monitoring by the electoral management body has not been effective. For these reasons, Mexico is an ideal case in which to verify whether the prevailing practice of vote buying traveled beyond borders.
　　　
Specifically, we conducted a list experiment for a sample of about 1000 Mexican immigrant respondents in the US, which were classified into three groups (treatment, control, and direct questions), in late August in 2018, one month after the first federal election conducted following the 2014 reform. We asked respondents about vote buying experiences, demographic attributes, partisanship, political attitude, information environment, and vote choice in the recent elections.
　　　
Our experiment provides the followings. First, approximately almost 30 percent of the respondents experienced vote buying, because the difference in the number of question items on average between treatment and control group significantly differs. Second, the social desirability bias is confirmed because the difference in the number of items on average is statistically significant. Third, regression analysis shows that being male, young, less educated, wealthy, full-time worker, contacted by party activists, and supporter of PAN is more likely to experience vote buying. These findings are robust and free from design effect because we are unable to reject the null hypothesis.
　　　
Our analysis demonstrates that Mexican politicians attempted to buy votes across borders in that elections. This result is inconclusive because further analysis is expected to test the effect of additional covariates such as resident locations of immigrants and the way the transaction of vote buying occurred. Nevertheless, this study is the first one to empirically demonstrate that vote buying did occur across borders, and show that this malpractice dies hard.

Authors

• Yuriko Takahashi, Waseda University

• Takeshi Iida, Doshisha University

• Jaehyun Song, Waseda University

• Jesus Tovar, Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico