Networks, Information, and Vote Buying

May 8, 2019 12:00PM E53-482

Vote buying is prevalent in developing countries, particularly in rural settings characterized by dense social networks. We investigate the role of networks in sustaining vote buying. Combining village network data of brokers and voters with broker survey data on vote buying, we create a measure of information diffusion to show that networks diffuse politically-relevant information about voters to brokers who leverage it to effectively target voters. This finding is robust to exploiting only within broker and voter variation, as well as to accounting for homophily and for the enforcement role that networks may play. In particfular, we show that brokers target reciprocal voters who are not registered to their party and about whom they can hear more information. These results highlight the importance of information diffusion through social networks for vote buying and ultimately political outcomes.

Latin American Working Group