Who Lies About Electoral Gifts?

Abstract

While political campaigns commonly employ clientelistic mobilization tactics during elections in developing countries, studying vote buying with mass surveys has proven difficult since respondents often will not admit to receiving a gift or favor in exchange for their votes. This study explores the degree to which respondents vary in their reporting of the receipt of goods or favors. Analysis of list experiments included in 10 surveys conducted in eight Latin American countries demonstrates the widespread prevalence of underreporting and shows that it is best predicted by three different sources of question sensitivity. First, bias is greater among respondents with higher levels of education, likely due to greater understanding and awareness of democratic norms about vote buying. Second, since vote buying is often stigmatized as resulting from poverty, those who are particularly sensitive to questions about income also prove to be much more likely to edit their answers. Finally, bias is positively associated with the degree to which the goods distributed violate democratic norms, as bias is smallest in countries in which the gifts consist largely of innocuous campaign materials and items such as clothing and food. The results not only point to probable biases in analyses conducted using direct measures of gift dispensation, but also illuminate how social attitudes about vote buying have spread in different countries in Latin America