Working Paper: NBER ID: w26241
Authors: Ral Duarte; Frederico Finan; Horacio Larreguy; Laura Schechter
Abstract: Throughout much of the developing world, politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes prior to elections. We investigate how social networks help facilitate vote-buying exchanges by combining village network data of brokers and voters with broker reports of vote buying. We show that networks diffuse politically-relevant information about voters to brokers who leverage it to target voters. In particular, we find that brokers target reciprocal voters who are not registered to their party and about whom they can hear more information through their social network. These results highlight the importance of information diffusion through social networks for vote buying and ultimately for political outcomes.
Keywords: vote buying; social networks; political brokers; information diffusion
JEL Codes: D72
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| broker's hearing (G24) | vote-buying index (D72) |
| broker's hearing (G24) | broker's overall knowledge about voters (D79) |
| broker's overall knowledge about voters (D79) | targeting reciprocal voters (D72) |
| information diffusion (D85) | targeting decisions (L21) |