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\"Many politicians across the world deliver material benefits to citizens in direct exchange for political support. Recent news headlines provide a glimpse of this phenomenon\"-- Provided by publisher.

Scholars typically understand vote buying as offering particularistic benefits in exchange for vote choices. This depiction of vote buying presents a puzzle: with the secret ballot, what prevents individuals from accepting rewards and then voting as they wish? An alternative explanation, which I term “turnout buying,” suggests why parties might offer rewards even if they cannot monitor vote choices. By rewarding unmobilized supporters for showing up at the polls, parties can activate their passive constituencies. Because turnout buying targets supporters, it only requires monitoring whether individuals vote. Much of what scholars interpret as vote buying may actually be turnout buying. Reward targeting helps to distinguish between these strategies. Whereas Stokes's vote-buying model predicts that parties target moderate opposers, a model of turnout buying predicts that they target strong supporters. Although the two strategies coexist, empirical tests suggest that Argentine survey data in Stokes 2005 are more consistent with turnout buying.

Politicians often buy votes with impunity. Brazil outlawed vote buying for many years, but prosecutions were rare. However, popular pressure mounted against the practice in the late 1990s. Over one million Brazilians signed a petition against vote buying, leading to the country’s first law by popular initiative passed by the national legislature. The law not only surmounted key obstacles to the popular initiative process but also dramatically increased prosecutions for clientelism during elections. Campaign handouts became the top reason that politicians were ousted in Brazil, with over a thousand removals from office. This study examines the role of civil society and the judiciary in the enactment and implementation of this important legislation. Os políticos frequentemente compram votos sem serem punidos. O Brasil proibiu a compra de votos por muitos anos, mas processos penais foram raros. No entanto, a pressão popular contra a prática aumentou no final dos anos 90. Mais de um milhão de brasileiros assinaram uma petição contra a compra de votos, levando à primeira lei do país de iniciativa popular a ser aprovada pelo Congresso Nacional. Essa lei não apenas superou os principais obstáculos do processo de iniciativa popular, mas também aumentou dramaticamente os processos por clientelismo eleitoral. A compra de votos se tornou a principal razão pela qual os políticos foram afastados no Brasil, com mais de mil cassações de mandatos. Este estudo examina o papel da sociedade civil e do judiciário na promulgação e implementação desta importante legislação.

Although many studies of clientelism focus exclusively on vote buying, political machines often employ diverse portfolios of strategies. We provide a theoretical framework and formal model to explain how and why machines mix four clientelist strategies during elections: vote buying, turnout buying, abstention buying, and double persuasion. Machines tailor their portfolios to the political preferences and voting costs of the electorate. They also adapt their mix to at least five contextual factors: compulsory voting, ballot secrecy, political salience, machine support, and political polarization. Our analysis yields numerous insights, such as why the introduction of compulsory voting may increase vote buying, and why enhanced ballot secrecy may increase turnout buying and abstention buying. Evidence from various countries is consistent with our predictions and suggests the need for empirical studies to pay closer attention to the ways in which machines combine clientelist strategies.

Studies of clientelism typically assume that political machines distribute rewards to persuade or mobilize the existing electorate. We argue that rewards not only influence actions of the electorate, but can also shape its composition. Across the world, machines employ \"voter buying\" to import outsiders into their districts. Voter buying demonstrates how clientelism can underpin electoral fraud, and it offers an explanation of why machines deliver rewards when they cannot monitor vote choices. Our analyses suggest that voter buying dramatically influences municipal elections in Brazil. A regression discontinuity design suggests that voter audits—which undermined voter buying—decreased the electorate by 12 percentage points and reduced the likelihood of mayoral reelection by 18 percentage points. Consistent with voter buying, these effects are significantly greater in municipalities with large voter inflows, and where neighboring municipalities had large voter outflows. Findings are robust to an alternative research design using a different data set.

This study argues that economic vulnerability causes citizens to participate in clientelism, a phenomenon with various pernicious consequences. To examine how reduced vulnerability affects citizens’ participation in clientelism, we employ two exogenous shocks to vulnerability. First, we designed a randomized control trial to reduce household vulnerability: our development intervention constructed residential water cisterns in drought- prone areas of Brazil. Second, we exploit rainfall shocks. We find that reducing vulnerability significantly decreases requests for private goods from politicians, especially among citizens likely to be in clientelist relationships. Moreover, reducing vulnerability decreases votes for incumbent mayors, who typically have more resources for clientelism.

This study estimates the effect of economic conditions on redistributive conflict. We examine land invasions in Brazil using a panel data set with over 50,000 municipality-year observations. Adverse economic shocks, instrumented by rainfall, cause the rural poor to invade and occupy large landholdings. This effect exhibits substantial heterogeneity by land inequality and land tenure systems, but not by other observable variables. In highly unequal municipalities, negative income shocks cause twice as many land invasions as in municipalities with average land inequality. Cross-sectional estimates using fine within-region variation also suggest the importance of land inequality in explaining redistributive conflict.

Recent studies of clientelism predominantly focus on how elites use rewards to influence vote choices and turnout. This article shifts attention towards citizens and their choices beyond the ballot box. Under what conditions does clientelism influence citizens' decisions to express political preferences publicly? When voters can obtain future benefits by declaring support for victorious candidates, their choices to display political paraphernalia on their homes or bodies may reflect more than just political preferences. We argue that various factors, such as political competition and candidates' monitoring ability, heighten citizens' propensity to declare support in response to clientelist inducements. Building on insights from fieldwork, formal analyses reveal how and why such factors can distort patterns of political expression observed during electoral campaigns. We conduct an experiment in Brazil, which predominantly corroborates predictions about declared support and clientelism.

In many countries, clientelist parties (or political machines) distribute selective benefits, especially to the poor, in direct exchange for electoral support. Many scholars view clientelism as a political strategy, but fail to distinguish between substantively different patterns of machine politics. Conflating distinct strategies of clientelism poses a serious threat to descriptive and causal inference. This study seeks to increase analytical differentiation of clientelism, building on fieldwork in Brazil, formal modeling, and econometric analyses of survey data. A fundamental, yet frequently overlooked, distinction lies between strategies of electoral and relational clientelism. Whereas electoral clientelism involves elite payoffs to citizens during campaigns, relational clientelism involves ongoing relationships beyond campaigns. Electoral clientelism—the primary focus of this study—delivers all benefits to citizens before voting, and involves the threat of opportunistic defection by citizens. By contrast, relational clientelism delivers at least some benefits to citizens after voting, and involves the threat of opportunistic defection by both citizens and elites. Scholars often conflate vote buying with other strategies of electoral clientelism. Much of what scholars interpret as vote buying (exchanging rewards for vote choices) may actually be turnout buying (exchanging rewards for turnout). This study advances research on clientelism by specifying and testing a mechanism by which parties can distribute benefits to mobilize supporters. Formal modeling suggests that turnout buying is incentive-compatible, and also provides several testable predictions: (1) machines focus rewards on strong supporters, (2) they target the poor, and (3) they offer rewards where they can most effectively monitor turnout. Although both strategies coexist, empirical tests suggest that Argentine survey data are more consistent with turnout buying than vote buying. Two other strategies of electoral clientelism are also frequently conflated with vote buying: double persuasion (exchanging rewards for vote choices and turnout) and negative turnout buying (exchanging rewards for abstention). Formal analysis in Chapter 4—coauthored with Jordan Gans-Morse and Sebastian Mazzuca—suggests that political machines are most effective when combining multiple strategies of electoral clientelism. Machines adapt the size of clientelist benefits to citizens' political preferences and inclination to vote, and are willing to pay relatively more for vote buying because unlike other strategies it both adds votes for the machine and subtracts votes from the opposition. The model also suggests that machines tailor their mix of electoral clientelism to five characteristics of political environments: (1) compulsory voting, (2) machine support, (3) political polarization, (4) salience of political preferences, and (5) strength of ballot secrecy. The model's predictions are consistent with qualitative evidence from Argentina, Brazil and Russia.

Although various studies suggest that corruption affects public health systems, the literature lacks causal evidence about whether anti-corruption interventions can improve health outcomes. The present article provides novel evidence that one such intervention — anti-corruption audits — improved early-life mortality in Brazil. The Brazilian government conducted audits in 1,949 randomly selected municipalities between 2003 and 2015. To identify the causal effect of anti-corruption audits on early-life mortality, we analyze official data on health outcomes from individual-level vital statistics before and after the intervention. A randomly audited municipality is estimated to experience 0.48 fewer child deaths (95% CI: -0.81, -0.15) and 0.34 fewer infant deaths (-0.61, -0.07) per year, relative to never experiencing an audit. The audit program is estimated to have prevented the deaths of 7,014 (2,216, 11,813) children, including 5,028 (891, 9,165) infants. The observed mortality in audited municipalities is approximately 94 percent of the child deaths, and 95 percent of the infant deaths, that would have occurred in the absence of the intervention. Early-life mortality fell especially sharply for nonwhite Brazilians, who face significant health disparities. Effects are greater when examining deaths from preventable causes, and show temporal persistence with large effects even a decade after audits. In addition, the intervention led to a substantial increase in women receiving recommended levels of prenatal care; this effect is likewise concentrated among nonwhite Brazilians. This causal evidence suggests that government anti-corruption interventions have the potential to improve health outcomes, a finding that deserves investigation in other countries.