Buying the Votes of the Poor: How the Electoral System Matters

Election campaigns in new democracies are often characterised by significant amounts of vote buying – attempts by political parties to mobilize support by distributing cash or material benefits to voters in exchange for support before the election. In the existing literature, it is widely accepted that poverty is a key source of vote buying at both the micro and macro level: Poor countries are supposed to have higher levels of vote buying, and within countries too, poor people are often identified as the prime targets of vote buying campaigns by political parties. However, poverty does not always translate into widespread vote buying, and nor are incentives for political parties and candidates to pursue costly vote buying campaigns always uniform. In this paper, we examine how the character of the electoral system may condition the effect of poverty on vote buying. While poverty generally creates fertile grounds for electoral clientelism and vote buying, the extent to which party candidates have incentives to pursue vote buying campaigns during elections is strongly moderated by the nature of the electoral system. Specifically, we argue that the effects of poverty on vote buying are strongest in plurality electoral systems, where election for office depends directly on personal vote counts, while proportional electoral systems tend to offset incentives to use vote buying as a means to get elected for office. Empirically, we use macro-level data from a cross-section of countries in Latin America and Africa to examine the argument. While there is a strong positive correlation between poverty and vote buying, our results also suggest that the effect of poverty on vote buying becomes weaker under proportional election systems. However, using South Africa as a case of a country with widespread poverty and a highly proportional electoral system, we use micro-level survey to show that – even when the electoral system provides weak incentives for vote buying – political parties still mainly target poor people with vote buying campaigns during elections. The electoral system may therefore weaken the incentives for party candidates to buy the votes of the poor, but it does not eliminate electoral clientelism targeted at the poor in new democracies.