How Do Rules and Institutions Encourage Vote Buying?
نویسنده
چکیده
terms of both its causes and its consequences. Chapter 3 discusses a variety of conditions that lead to a market for votes, including the availability of cost-efficient alternatives to vote buying. In this chapter, I explore a few of the political and institutional factors that can make vote buying a more or less attractive strategy for parties and candidates vis-à-vis some of these alternatives. In doing so, I discuss only briefly various structural and cultural explanations of vote buying, such as level of economic development, cultural norms, and the prevalence of patron-client networks. Each of these certainly plays a part in shaping the mix of electoral strategies that parties and candidates choose to employ. However, in this chapter I focus on the ways in which various rules and institutions can affect the incentive and capacity to buy votes.1 I do not discuss here the logistics of vote buying— how candidates and parties organize vote brokers, avoid detection, and minimize slippage. These issues are dealt with at length in Chapters 3 and 5. Why focus on institutions if they are only part of a chain of variables that can motivate or discourage vote buying? First, certain institutions have independent, predictable, and discernible effects on vote buying incentives. While they are only one piece of the puzzle, they are an important piece. Second, although institutional reform is by no means easy, institutions such as electoral rules and campaign finance regulations are arguably more malleable than cultural norms or levels of development in the short to medium term. As a result, institutional reform is often an important part of anti–vote buying campaigns (see Chapter 9). I consider here the factors that motivate candidates to adopt personal electoral strategies, including vote buying. These include candidate-centered electoral systems, access to government resources, and decentralized party nomination and funding procedures. Each candidate for elected office must select an electoral strategy (or mix of strategies) by determining when
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