The gendered and racialised dynamics of vote buying

Candidates often employ stigmatized campaign practices they believe will strengthen their electoral chances. Vote buying is one of the tactics. Particularly in clientelistic systems, candidates who employ vote buying seek to signal to voters that they have more resources and, thus, are more electorally competitive than contenders who do not employ the practice. If this is indeed the case, candidates’ engagement with vote buying should affect voters’ perceptions of their electoral strength. Voters’ evaluations of candidates, however, are often gendered and racialised. We expect that the employment of vote buying may increase voters’ confidence in the electoral viability of women and candidates from marginalised racial groups. Nonetheless, because vote buying challenges voters’ benevolent stereotypes of women as honest and pure and of Black candidates as hard-working aspirants who achieve office based on superior merit, the use of such a stigmatised practice by candidates from these groups may incur greater losses in voter support. We test these expectations with data from two survey experiments with Brazilian respondents (N=2,000 and N=1,800), one of which includes an implicit association test (IAT).