Good Democrats, Bad Targets: Democratic Values and Clientelistic Vote Buying

Abstract

Who do parties target for clientelistic vote buying? Existing research looks almost exclusively at individuals’ socioeconomic and, especially, electoral profiles—which parties and candidates they support, professed ideological leanings, past voting turnout, and choice. We argue party brokers also consider democratic attitudinal profiles. Specifically, they are more likely to avoid full-fledged democrats and target citizens who are ambivalent to or reject core democratic principles. We test this proposition with the 2010 Argentina AmericasBarometer. To address selection bias on observables and unobservables, respectively, we preprocess the data with entropy balancing and employ instrumental variables regression. Results from both strategies are consistent with the notion that democrats are less likely vote-buying targets than their less democratic counterparts. Effect sizes are on par with or exceed other theoretical variables, and the results are robust to a variety of checks and specifications.