Shopping for Votes in Latin America: When Do Legislators Engage in Vote-Buying Practices?

Corral, Margarita; Rosón, Mar Martínez

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-51584-3_5

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 47 publications

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“…Scholarship on how politicians use their special powers for private gains have mainly focused on informal behaviour. In Latin American politics, a diverse array of such informal practices exists, including political corruption (Rotberg, 2019); irregular campaign financing (Moya & Figueroa, 2018); clientelism (Hilgers, 2012), which is easier for politicians with access to state resources (Corral & Martínez, 2020); forbearance (Holland, 2016); patronage (Panizza et al, 2023); and cronyism or nepotism (Rehren, 2000). Political elites that advance their agendas by using their special powers can produce undesired social and political outcomes.…”

Section: Political Elites and The Production Of Institutional Weaknessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political elites, agency discretion and anti-corruption governance in Chile

Schorr,

Carrasco,

Moya

2024

ERLACS

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Between 2015 and 2018, Chile experienced several political corruption scandals that implicated the country’s political elite across the party spectrum. However, the outcomes of the ensuing judicial investigations have faced wide-spread criticism for being unsatisfactory, failing to set legal precedence, and weakening Chile’s anti-corruption governance. This article addresses the gap between Chile’s strong structural and formal conditions and the limited legal consequences faced by politicians involved in corruption. It examines the factors that allowed most politicians and their allies to avoid significant legal penalties. Drawing on different literatures related to professional politicians and political elites, institutional weakness, and agency discretion, the article analyses four prominent political corruption cases. We argue that favourable appointments of sympathetic executives allowed the Chilean political elite to exert control over the discretionary powers of state agencies involved in the legal processes. The article relies on a press review, secondary literature, and expert interviews. Resumen: Elites políticas, discrecionalidad de agencias y gobernanza anticorrupción en Chile Entre 2015 y 2018, Chile experimentó varios escándalos de corrupción política que implicaron a la élite política de todos los partidos. Sin embargo, los resultados de las investigaciones judiciales subsiguientes han sido objeto de críticas generalizadas por ser insatisfactorios, no sentar precedentes legales y debilitar la gobernanza anticorrupción de Chile. Este artículo aborda la brecha entre las sólidas condiciones estructurales y formales de Chile y las limitadas consecuencias legales a las que se enfrentan los políticos implicados en casos de corrupción. Examina los factores que permitieron a la mayoría de los políticos y sus aliados evitar sanciones legales significativas. Basándose en diferentes literaturas relacionadas con los políticos profe-sionales y las élites políticas, la debilidad institucional y la discrecionalidad de la agencia, el artículo analiza cuatro destacados casos de corrupción política. Argumentamos que los nombramientos favorables de ejecutivos simpatizantes permitieron a la élite política chilena ejercer control sobre los poderes discrecionales de las agencias estatales involucradas en los procesos legales. El artículo se basa en una revisión de prensa, literatura secundaria y entrevistas a expertos.

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Section: Political Elites and The Production Of Institutional Weaknessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political elites, agency discretion and anti-corruption governance in Chile

Schorr,

Carrasco,

Moya

2024

ERLACS

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Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

Justesen¹,

Manzetti²

2023

Lat Am Polit Soc

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Electoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying—a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. This article examines how clientelist parties’ use of vote buying is jointly shaped by two voter traits: poverty and partisanship. We hypothesize that clientelist parties pursue a mixed strategy, broadly targeting their core voters but also poor swing voters. While most of the existing evidence comes from single-country studies, this study adds cross-national evidence from multilevel regressions of survey data from 22 Latin American countries. Empirically, we find that poverty matters mainly for swing voters. For partisans, the effect of poverty on vote buying is weaker. These results suggest that poverty plays an important role in vote-buying strategies—but also that partisanship moderates clientelistic parties’ vote-buying strategies during electoral campaigns.

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Shopping for Votes in Latin America: When Do Legislators Engage in Vote-Buying Practices?

Cited by 2 publications

References 47 publications

Political elites, agency discretion and anti-corruption governance in Chile

Political elites, agency discretion and anti-corruption governance in Chile

Poverty, Partisanship, and Vote Buying in Latin America

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