Partisan Reactions to Endogenous Election Timing: Evidence from Conjoint Experiments in Japan

Are candidates who hand out clientelistic goods at election time less likely to provide services once they take office? This paper examines the poor's expectations of future service provision by candidates who hand out money and other goods versus those who do not. We hypothesize that the poor's expectations should depend on the density of social ties. To test this hypothesis, we use hierarchical models to analyse observational data and two conjoint experiments embedded in a unique survey of Kenyans, Malawians, and Zambians.