Voting in Clientelistic Social Networks: Evidence From the Philippines*

Abstract

In clientelistic environments, voters want to know which politicians are most likely to deliver on targeted benefits. We argue that in these contexts, voters use their social proximity with candidates as heuristics to inform vote choice. To test our theory, we rely on local naming conventions to reconstruct family networks spanning one whole city in the Philippines and assess blood and marriage links between voters and local candidates. We then collect survey data on pre-election candidate leanings and actual voting behavior of 894 randomly drawn voters. We show that the degrees of separation between voters and candidates explain not only aggregate electoral outcomes, as previous studies have found, but also individual vote choice, controlling for pre-election leanings. We demonstrate that this is because private inducements are channeled through family networks. These findings highlight the electoral importance of social proximity with politicians as an information shortcut when voters are choosing whom to support at the polls.