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Vote-Buying and Reciprocity

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  • Frederico Finan
  • Laura A. Schechter

Abstract

While vote-buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote-buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote-buying with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 17411.

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Date of creation: Sep 2011
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:17411

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Cited by:
  1. Javier E. Baez & Adriana Camacho & Emily Conover & Román A. Zárate, 2012. "Conditional Cash Transfers, Political Participation, and Voting Behavior," DOCUMENTOS CEDE 010312, UNIVERSIDAD DE LOS ANDES-CEDE.
  2. Julien Labonne, 2012. "The local electoral impacts of conditional cash transfers: Evidence from a field experiment," CSAE Working Paper Series 2012-09, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
  3. Karthik Reddy & Moritz Schularick & Vasiliki Skreta, 2012. "Germs, Social Networks and Growth," Working Papers 12-17, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics.

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