How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia

Abstract

Political parties in sub-Saharan Africa's developing democracies are often considered to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) among incumbent parties with greater access to resources and (b) where the scope for turnout buying is higher due to the higher costs of voting. Using postwar Liberia to test our argument, we combine rich administrative data with exogenous variation in parties' ability to monitor their brokers. We show that brokers mobilize voters en masse to signal effort, that increased monitoring ability improves the incumbent party's electoral performance, and that this is particularly so in precincts in which voters must travel farther to vote and thus turnout buying opportunities are greater. Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/REXZ8H. A rapidly expanding literature illustrates the critical role of political intermediaries in brokering electoral outcomes in clientelistic developing democracies. Brokers are contracted to ensure that the citizens under their influence turn out to register and vote for a particular candidate. Much research has focused on the methods brokers use to enforce such behavior (Duarte

Buying Power: Electoral Strategy before the Secret Vote

“…A variety of studies claim that politicians can in fact accomplish this. In particular, it has been argued that patrons can learn about broker effectiveness by employing metrics such as citizen participation in rallies (Szwarcberg 2015) or, more commonly, aggregate voting behavior at polling stations or other electoral jurisdictions (Bowles, Larreguy, and Liu Forthcoming;Gottlieb and Larreguy 2020;Larreguy 2013;Larreguy, Marshall, and Querubín 2016). Yet the empirical case is far from settled.…”

Information Versus Control: The Electoral Consequences of Polling Place Creation

“…A rich literature studies how these parties engage in clientelistic exchanges with voters (Finan and Schechter 2012;Nichter 2008;Stokes 2005) and even commit outright outright electoral fraud, including deliberate miscounting of votes or fraudulent registration (Birch 2012;Cantú 2014Cantú , 2019Hidalgo and Nichter 2016;Simpser 2013). These strategies are furthermore conditioned by features of the electoral administration they face, including those affecting citizens' costs of voting (Bowles et al 2019;Gans-Morse et al 2014;Hariri et al 2019).…”

“…First, an increase in the number of polling places in an area reduces the number of registered voters per polling place. This is useful for assessing incumbent support and conditioning rewards and sanctions both to party brokers who work in particular localities (Bowles et al 2019;Gingerich 2020;Larreguy 2013;Larreguy et al 2016) and to voters in that area (Gottlieb and Larreguy 2020;Rueda 2017). Voters and brokers, anticipating these contingent effects, might be incentivized to exert more effort in support of the incumbent party (Rosenzweig 2019).…”

Election Administration, Resource Allocation, and Turnout: Evidence From Kenya

“… 9. This contrasts with Mexico (e.g., Ascencio & Rueda, 2019), Colombia, and Liberia (Bowles et al, 2020). …”

“…See Gingerich and Medina (2013) with theory and evidence from Brazil; Stokes (2005) and Nichter (2008) on Argentina; Rueda (2017) on Colombia; Larreguy et al (2016) on Mexico. See Bowles et al (2020) for work on Liberia.…”