Do Electoral Handouts Affect Voting Behavior?∗

The literature on vote-buying assumes a complete transaction of cash for votes. While there is ample evidence that candidates do target certain voters with cash handouts, it is unclear whether these actually result in higher turnout and voteshares for the distributing party. In this paper we argue that in settings with low level of monitoring by political parties, such as many African countries, parties might be unable to provide a sufficient level of bribes to ensure sustained cooperation from voters. Theoretically, we show that even in infinitely repeated settings low monitoring leads to prohibitively high level of bribes thus explaining why incomplete transactions of cash for votes are so prevalent. Empirically, we find that cash handouts have no effect on either turnout or vote-shares when using different matching techniques and including constituency-level fixed effects during the 2011 Beninese presidential election. We cross-validate these results with two additional surveys from Benin and Kenya. These findings suggest that vote-buying in sub-Saharan Africa is better explained as an incomplete transaction between candidates and voters, and that constituency-level variables such as patronage or targeted public goods have much stronger effects on voting behavior than electoral handouts. ∗We thank the participants of the 2012 Columbia-NYU African Political Economic Research Seminar (CAPERS) and to Alex Bolton, Chris Blattman, Macartan Humphreys, Kimuli Kasara, Elisabeth Sperber, David Stasavage, Shana Warren, Emily West as well as participants of the 2013 Midwest Political Science Association Conference (MPSA) and special thanks to our discussant Gwyneth Hartman McClendon. All remaining errors are our own.