Beyond Poverty: A Cultural Approach to Vote Buying

• In Event: 261 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 15. Political community and power

Abstract

Why do individuals sell their vote? Recent scholarship emphasizes the role of material incentives to explain vote buying. Either because voters need the goods distributed by politicians (Stokes et al. 2013; Auyero 2000b; Scott 1972) or because they feel indebted to politicians (Lawson and Greene 2014; Finan and Schechter 2012), materialist-based approaches relate clientelism with poverty. Based on ethnographic evidence from Sertão of Bahia in Brazil, a region in which poor voters have increased their income level in recent years, I show how clientelism works in a radically different way than suggested by materialistic approaches. Voters across social classes bargained their votes and politicians distributed handouts in a massive way without having any guarantee that voters would actually vote for them. Current materialist approaches fail to explain the reality of these practices in Sertão of Bahia. These can only be understood when taking into account the shared cultural understanding of politics of the actors on the ground. Individuals understand and live politics as a way to solve their personal problems by giving their vote in order to get access to a politicians’ brokerage. I call this the logic of access of politics. The existence of this logic is demonstrated by showing how it gives intelligibility to apparently unrelated situations from Sertão of Bahia. Finally, the cultural codes created around this logic explain why vote buying is so widespread in Sertão even though voters and politicians are critical about these practices.

Author

• Mariana Borges Martins da Silva, Northwestern