The Endurance and Eclipse of the Controlled Vote: A Formal Model of Vote Brokerage Under the Secret Ballot

Gingerich, Daniel W.; Medina, Luis Fernando

doi:10.1111/ecpo.12020

Cited by 38 publications

(33 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Furthermore, to focus on the moral hazard dimension of the problem, we assume all brokers on the electoral outcome accordingly. Larreguy (2013) and Gingerich and Medina (2013) model signal extraction in similar contexts to ours. 16 If parties instead maximized their probability of winning districts (or the Presidency) or a legislative majority, the implications of our model are unchanged.…”

Section: Setupmentioning

confidence: 84%

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

2016

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Despite its prevalence, little is known about when parties buy turnout. We emphasize the problem of parties monitoring local brokers with incentives to shirk. Our model suggests that parties extract greater turnout buying effort from their brokers where they can better monitor broker performance and where favorable voters would not otherwise turn out. Exploiting exogenous variation in the number of polling stations—and thus electoral information about broker performance—in Mexican electoral precincts, we find that greater monitoring capacity increases turnout and votes for the National Action Party (PAN) and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Consistent with our theoretical predictions, the effect of monitoring capacity on PRI votes varies nonlinearly with the distance of voters to the polling station: it first increases because rural voters—facing larger costs of voting—generally favor the PRI, before declining as the cost of incentivizing brokers increases. This nonlinearity is not present for the PAN, who stand to gain less from mobilizing rural voters.

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Section: Setupmentioning

confidence: 84%

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

2016

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“…One strategy is to allocate resources to brokers based on comprehensive contracts. This means that brokers receive some specified benefit (such as monetary payment or a government job) after an election based on the electoral returns for their patron (Gingerich and Medina 2013;Rueda 2015). Although intuitively appealing, a comprehensive contracts framework does not reflect the empirical dynamics of brokerage in various settings.…”

Section: Brokers and Politiciansmentioning

confidence: 99%

Buying Power: Electoral Strategy before the Secret Vote

Gingerich

2020

Am Polit Sci Rev

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Research on clientelism emphasizes the use of brokers to mobilize voters. To utilize these agents efficiently, politicians must learn about brokers’ relative abilities and allocate scarce resources accordingly. Drawing upon a hand-coded dataset based on the archives of Gustavo Capanema, a powerful mid-twentieth-century congressman from Minas Gerais, Brazil, this paper offers the first direct evidence of such learning dynamics. The analysis concentrates on Brazil’s pre-secret ballot era, a time when measuring broker performance was particularly straightforward. Consistent with theories of political learning, the data demonstrate that resource flows to local machines were contingent on the deviation between actual and expected votes received in previous elections. Moreover, given politicians’ ability to discern mobilization capacity, payments to brokers were highly effective in bringing out the vote.

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“…Greater population density makes it more difficult for traditional elites to monitor and profit from clientelistic exchanges, thereby limiting the influence of material inducements on voting patterns (Brusco, Nazareno and Stokes, 2004;Gingerich and Medina, 2013). Finally, and arguably most important, due to the erosion of traditional socioeconomic hierarchies in early reforming areas, voters in these areas are less likely to adhere to norms dictating deference to elites.…”

Section: The Long-term Implications Of Labor Supply Shocks For Electomentioning

confidence: 99%

Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany

Vogler

Gingerich

2020

Preprint

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Do pandemics have lasting consequences for political behavior? We examine the consequences of the most deadly pandemic in recorded history: the Black Death (1347-1351). Our claim is that pandemics can influence politics in the long run if they impose sufficient loss of life so as to augment the price of labor relative to other factors of production. When this occurs, labor repressive regimes become untenable, which ultimately leads to the development of proto-democratic institutions and associated political cultures that shape modalities of political engagement for generations. We test our theory by tracing out the Black Death’s consequences in German-speaking Central Europe. We find that areas hit hardest by the pandemic were more likely to:(1) adopt inclusive political institutions and equitable land ownership patterns;(2) exhibit electoral behavior indicating independence from landed elite influence during the transition to mass politics; and (3) have significantly lower vote shares for Hitler's National Socialist Party.

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The Endurance and Eclipse of the Controlled Vote: A Formal Model of Vote Brokerage Under the Secret Ballot

Cited by 38 publications

References 34 publications

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

Parties, Brokers, and Voter Mobilization: How Turnout Buying Depends Upon the Party’s Capacity to Monitor Brokers

Buying Power: Electoral Strategy before the Secret Vote

Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany

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