Peer-reviewed article · 2022
Brokers, Social Networks, Reciprocity, and Clientelism
Nico Ravanilla, Dotan Haim, and Allen Hicken · American Journal of Political Science 66(4): 795-812
In brief
How vote-buying brokers choose their targets in the Philippines: in dense village networks they pick well-connected voters they can monitor; in sparse networks they pick voters likely to reciprocate on their own.
Abstract
Although canonical models of clientelism argue that brokers use dense social networks to monitor and enforce vote buying, recent evidence suggests that brokers can instead target intrinsically reciprocal voters and reduce the need for active monitoring and enforcement. Combining a trove of survey data on brokers and voters in the Philippines with an experiment-based measure of reciprocity, and relying on local naming conventions to build social networks, we demonstrate that brokers employ both strategies conditional on the underlying social network structure. We show that brokers are chosen for their central position in networks and are knowledgeable about voters, including their reciprocity levels. We then show that, where village social networks are dense, brokers prefer to target voters that have many ties in the network because their votes are easiest to monitor. Where networks are sparse, brokers target intrinsically reciprocal voters whose behavior they need not monitor.
Cite
@article{ravanilla2022brokers,
title = {Brokers, Social Networks, Reciprocity, and Clientelism},
author = {Nico Ravanilla and Dotan Haim and Allen Hicken},
journal = {American Journal of Political Science},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1111/ajps.12604},
}