Do voters hold politicians accountable for vote-buying?

by Rohini Pande, Jessica Leight, Dana Foarta, Laura Ralston
This article first appeared in VoxDev on October 10, 2021.

Despite the prevalence of vote-buying across many developing countries, there is little empirical evidence around how buying votes affects politicians’ performance or accountability once in office. In this VoxDevTalk, Jessica Leight discusses her recent work with co-authors Dana Foarta, Rohini Pande, and Laura Ralston in which they test how voters respond to vote-buying. They create a series of voting games whereby some voters receive payments from a politician, and then measure voters’ willingness to punish politicians for siphoning money from a common treasury. 

The authors find that voters who receive payments allow politicians to steal more, and that politicians do steal more once votes are bought. Acceptability towards corruption was highest when all voters received payments, but when only some voters received payments, those who didn’t were much more likely to hold politicians accountable for stealing. Their results show that incentives do exist for politicians to steal, particularly when the costs of buying votes is small compared to the potential gains of stealing once in office.