Peer-reviewed article · 2022
Voting in Clientelistic Social Networks: Evidence from the Philippines
Nico Ravanilla, Michael Davidson, and Allen Hicken · Comparative Political Studies 55(10): 1663-1697
In brief
Family networks and voting in the Philippines: voters closer to a candidate by blood or marriage are more likely to vote for them, because private inducements flow through family ties.
Abstract
In clientelistic environments, voters want to know which politicians are most likely to deliver on targeted benefits. We argue that in these contexts, voters use their social proximity with candidates as heuristics to inform vote choice. To test our theory, we rely on local naming conventions to reconstruct family networks spanning one whole city in the Philippines and assess blood and marriage links between voters and local candidates. We then collect survey data on pre-election candidate leanings and actual voting behavior of 894 randomly drawn voters. We show that the degrees of separation between voters and candidates explain not only aggregate electoral outcomes, as previous studies have found, but also individual vote choice, controlling for pre-election leanings. We demonstrate that this is because private inducements are channeled through family networks. These findings highlight the electoral importance of social proximity with politicians as an information shortcut when voters are choosing whom to support at the polls.
Research annotationQuestion, variables, design, findings, and mechanism at a glance▾
- Research question
- Does a voter's social proximity to candidates shape individual vote choice, beyond aggregate electoral patterns?
- Independent variable (X)
- Degrees of separation between voter and candidate through blood and marriage ties.
- Dependent variable (Y)
- Candidate vote shares at the village and district level, voters' pre-election favorability ratings of each candidate, self-reported vote choice, and whether a voter switched away from or toward a candidate between the pre-election and post-election surveys.
- Identification strategy
- Family networks covering all 80,904 registered voters on Sorsogon City's May 2013 Certified Voters List, built at the barangay, council-district, and city levels from shared middle and last names under Philippine naming conventions. Two survey waves on 895 randomly sampled voters measure candidate favorability weeks before the election and reported vote immediately after, covering the May 2013 city elections and the October 2013 barangay elections. The aggregate analysis is OLS at the candidate-by-village level on 1,811 candidates in 63 barangays, regressing log actual vote share on the log share of voters to whom the candidate is closest, with barangay fixed effects and barangay-clustered errors. The individual analysis is OLS at the voter-candidate dyad level across 895 voters and 41 city-level candidates, regressing favorability and reported vote on familial distance and its square, with district, candidate, and voter fixed effects and errors clustered at the respondent level.
- Main findings
- In the aggregate, a 1 percent increase in the share of voters closest to a candidate is associated with a 0.29 percent increase in that candidate's actual vote share, falling to 0.21 percent with barangay fixed effects and 0.17 percent in the fullest specification. At the individual level the relationship is nonlinear and concentrated between one and two degrees of separation: moving from one degree to two lowers a voter's favorability rating of the candidate by 0.67 points on a scale running from minus three to plus three, and lowers the probability of voting for that candidate by 20 percentage points, even after controlling for pre-election favorability. The result survives candidate and voter fixed effects together, which absorb name recall and candidate prominence.
- Mechanism
- Private inducements travel down family networks, so proximity signals which politician will actually deliver targeted benefits. The paper tests this by interacting voters' perceptions of how widespread vote buying was in their barangay with familial distance: higher perceived vote buying makes voters much less likely to abandon an initially favored candidate, and that holding effect is strongest for the candidates closest to them in the network.
- Why it matters
- Moves network explanations of clientelism from aggregate correlations to individual-level vote choice, and separates clientelist targeting from prior affinity by measuring candidate leanings before the campaign and vote after it.
- Speaks to
- clientelismsocial networks and votinginformation shortcuts and vote choice
Cite
@article{ravanilla2022networks,
title = {Voting in Clientelistic Social Networks: Evidence from the Philippines},
author = {Nico Ravanilla and Michael Davidson and Allen Hicken},
journal = {Comparative Political Studies},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1177/00104140211060275},
}