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Reseña:
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Most studies on vote buying in Latin America and abroad have been mainly interested in uncovering vote buying’s enforcement, different uses to it (i.e., as a mobilization tool or as a persuasion tool) and its main determinants, to name just a few. However, there has been a scarcity of theoretical and empirical studies that try to understand how the context in which people live and candidates compete affects the propensity of vote buyers to engage in the exchange of goods for votes. Such lack of consideration for context is surprising, given that clientelism is strongly characterized and viewed as a local practice. Therefore, I develop a simple theoretical argument with the goal of integrating individual and contextual level factors into a single analysis to understand the determinants of vote buying. Hence, I argue that vote buying is a function of monitoring capacity is facilitated and where electoral uncertainty is lower. I test the theory by running a multilevel analysis on survey data in the Brazilian case, complemented by a case study. The results obtained in the paper mainly confirm the theoretical expectations and suggest that context matters to explain vote buying, especially the electoral environment. |
