A Model of Vote-buying with an Incumbency Advantage
نویسنده
چکیده
Vote-buying, i.e., gifts given to voters before the elections in exchange for their votes, is a frequent practice during electoral campaigns in many parts of the world. However, in the presence of secret ballots, it is not clear whether and how vote-buying drives voting behavior. This paper proposes a simple model of vote-buying with two candidates where (i) the level of enforcement of vote-buying transactions is not fixed, (ii), bribable and non-bribable voters co-exist, and (iii) there is an incumbency advantage. In equilibrium both candidates buy votes. We find that a voter education campaign, understood to decrease the enforcement of vote-buying transactions or the share of bribable voters, decreases voter turnout and favors the incumbent. JEL Codes: D72, P16.
منابع مشابه
Incumbency preservation through electoral legislation: The case of the secret ballot
The secret ballot was designed to eliminate the incentive for candidates to purchase votes through direct vote buying. When voters have private information on their candidate preferences, incumbent candidates will generally be less efficient in purchasing votes than their challengers. Incumbent candidates may therefore benefit from the elimination of direct vote purchasing. Viewed in this vein,...
متن کاملUsing Term Limits to Estimate Incumbency Advantages When O±ceholders Retire Strategically1
In an earlier contribution to this journal, Gelman and King (1990) propose methods of measuring the incumbency advantage that have become widely used in the literature. Recently, however, critics have argued that these measures, as well as less sophisticated measures of incumbency advantage that preceded them, su®er from a failure to consider strategic retirements that may lead to as much as a ...
متن کاملExploiting Tom DeLay: A New Method for Estimating Incumbency Advantage
We propose a new method for estimating incumbency advantage which relies upon the successive implementation of multiple redistricting plans, and demonstrate that the manner in which previous work has used redistricting to identify the causal effect of incumbency results in biased estimates. Strikingly, we show that even if voters were redistricted at random, previous uses of redistricting as a ...
متن کاملThe Incumbent in the Living Room: The Rise of Television and the Incumbency Advantage in U.S. House Elections
This study shows that the growth of television contributed to the rise in the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections during the 1960s. Incumbents received positive coverage throughout their term and were generally more newsworthy and better funded than their challengers during the campaign. Less-educated voters, for whom television presented a new, less demanding source of news, were most...
متن کاملVoting for Parties or for Candidates: Do Electoral Institutions Make a Difference?
Little is known about how electoral institutions systematically affect the level of incumbency advantage in legislative elections. In this paper, I analyze the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) data to put the U.S. case in a comparative context and explore how electoral institutions aid or preclude incumbents from gaining an advantage. In particular, I study whether electoral system...
متن کامل