Vote Buying or Campaign Promises? Electoral Strategies When Party Credibility Is Limited

Campaign Promises, Economic Performance, and Electoral Accountability in Latin America

Contestable Leaderships: Party Discipline and Vote Buying in Legislatures.∗

This paper examines the institutional determinants of discipline in legislative parties. The model formalizes the tradeoff between resources at the leaders discretion, and the incumbents need to maintain a minimum level of support to continue leading. The value of the incumbent leader’s promises of future benefits is here endogenously determined by the backbenchers’ beliefs about the extent of ...

Vote Buying

We examine the consequences of vote buying, as if this practice were allowed and free of stigma. Two parties competing in a binary election may purchase votes via up front binding payments and/or payments (platforms) that are contingent upon the outcome of the election. If voters care only about outcomes and not directly about how they vote, then the party with the largest budget wins at a negl...

Electoral Markets, Party Strategies, and Proportional Representation

Following Kreuzer’s (2010) methodological pleas, I first reflect, at the conceptual level, on the ways in which historical research and political science should be related to each other. I then apply some of those considerations to examine two key “moments” in the theory (and history) of institutional choice that I first presented in Boix (1999): the underlying conditions that shaped the intere...

Quadratic Vote Buying∗

A group of individuals with access to transfers seeks to make a binary collective decision. All known mechanisms they might use are either are often inefficient (e.g. voting), subject to severe collusion problems (e.g. the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism) or require the planner being informed about the distribution of valuations (e.g. the Expected Externality mechanism). I propose a simple, bud...