Three essays on electoral manipulation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Department of Political Science, 2014.In the developing world, it is common to find a disconnect between formal democratic institutions and the distribution of political power and accountability of public officials. Electoral manipulation is likely to be a major factor behind the gap between rules and the reality of everyday politics in these countries. Although there is a renewed interest in the study of electoral manipulation, we still lack a clear understanding of the mechanisms used by politicians to irregularly capture elections. This dissertation gives a closer look to the micro-foundations of different electoral manipulation strategies and identifies some of their key determinants. The first essay formally examines how vote buying is widespread even when vote brokers have limited knowledge about voters' attributes and voting choices. The model captures a monitoring scheme in which a broker conditions future bribes on her candidate reaching a threshold of votes in a given polling station. The main finding is that bribed voters will not vote as instructed by the broker if many others vote in the polling station. The result contrasts with all previous explanations of how these transactions are sustained, which rely on brokers being able to identify voters who will comply, or on the brokers' ability to circumvent the secrecy of the ballot. In the second essay, I empirically show that the aggregation levels of electoral results do influence the observed variation in electoral manipulation. Using data from Colombia, I uncover a robust negative correlation between the size of the average polling station and vote buying. I also document a negative association between the electorate size and all methods of manipulation, and I show that the relationship is stronger for vote buying than for turnout suppression and fraud. I argue that because vote buying has the largest marginal cost of implementation among these strategies, turnout suppression and fraud are more attractive in elections with large electorates. In the last essay, I empirically explore the relationship between vote buying and associational life. The paper shows that participation in groups in the community is positively associated with the incidence of these transactions. Contrary to the expectations derived from the traditional literature on social capital, this essay's findings show that institutions of civic participation can be used to increase the efficiency of electoral strategies of manipulation, reducing accountability, and more generally, affecting the quality of democratic processes