List Experiments, Political Sophistication, and Vote Buying: Experimental Evidence from Mexico

Rodrigo Castro Cornejo,Ulises Beltrán

doi:10.1177/1866802x20937713

Abstract

This research conducted list experiments to estimate the percentage of respondents who received electoral gifts during the 2015 legislative and the 2015 and 2017 subnational campaigns in Mexico. Consistent with recent studies on sensitive survey techniques, our research finds that list experiments seem to methodologically work better among more sophisticated voters (e.g. those with higher levels of education). Such findings suggest that previous studies that rely on list experiments tend to underestimate the percentage of voters who receive electoral gifts since this technique tends to work better among respondents who are, in fact, least likely to be targeted by clientelistic strategies. Given levels of education in the region, we suggest that research solely relying on list experiments approach its empirical findings with caution.

Highlights

Recent studies have shown that political campaigns, in Latin America, distribute a wide variety of electoral gifts
This study argues that—similar to randomised response (RR) drawbacks reported by past studies (Böckenholt and van der Heijden, 2007)—the taxing process entailed by the list experiment makes the survey technique difficult to use with populations with lower levels of education
Consistent with recent studies that show that the complexity of the method can make sensitive survey techniques difficult to use with populations with lower levels of education

Summary

They placed campaign advertisements on

It is important to mention that the difference between the list experiment and direct questioning (the “difference” column in Table 2) relates to the high level of self- reported vote buying we obtain, which relies on question wording that is different than the one used by Lawson et al (2013), Kiewiet de Jonge (2015), and Gonzalez-O cantos et al (2012), among others This group of studies relies on a single-filter question strategy, which, as previous survey methods studies have found, can decrease the proportion of respondents who are eligible for follow-up questions

A political party gave you a gift advertisements on

Findings

Discussion