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Still for sale: the micro-dynamics of vote selling in the United States, evidence from a list experiment

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Abstract

In nineteenth-century United States politics, vote buying was commonplace. Nowadays, vote buying seems to have declined. The quantitative empirical literature emphasizes vote buying, ignoring the micro-dynamics of vote selling. We seem to know that vote buyers can no longer afford this strategy; however, we do not know what American voters would do if offered the chance to sell their vote. Would they sell, and at what price, or would they consistently opt out of vote selling? A novel experimental dataset representative at the national level comprises 1479 US voters who participated in an online list experiment in 2016, and the results are striking: Approximately 25% would sell their vote for a minimum payment of $418. Democrats and Liberals are more likely to sell, while education or income levels do not seem to impact the likelihood of vote selling.

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Fig. 1

Source: LAPOP, 2010 wave for the United States. Question is clien1: “In recent years and thinking about election campaigns, has a candidate or someone from a political party offered you something, like a favor, food, or any other benefit or object in return for your vote or support? Has this happened often, sometimes, or never?”

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Notes

  1. It is important to note that clientelism as a practice involves more than just buying or selling votes. Other goods might be involved in the clientelist transaction—for instance, public jobs or public infrastructure, e.g., see for example Dixit and Londregan (1996), Calvo and Murillo (2004), and Khemani (2015). However, this paper’s focus is on just vote buying and vote selling.

  2. I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this comment.

  3. For the British case during the Victorian era see Kam (2017).

  4. Relatedly, see Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018).

  5. The U.S. Bureau of the Census did not exist. Consequently, it was relatively easy to invent names, “repeat,” or use any other subterfuge to “stuff the ballot box.” In fact, “a St. Louis politician admitted registry fraud but argued that there was no proof that the names he copied into the registry were of real people and, therefore, no crime had been committed” (Argersinger 1985, p. 680).

  6. Judges used as a rough proxy whether the prospective voter had the ability to grow a beard (Bensel 2004, p. 20).

  7. $1250 in 2017 US dollars. Conversion based on Williamson (2018).

  8. While list experiments are common, researchers unfortunately “[utilize] only a difference in means estimator, and [do] not provide a measure of the sensitive item for each respondent” (Glynn 2013, p. 159).

  9. For a hypothetical treatment list of four items.

  10. Research Now SSI collected the data between March 2 and March 6. Survey respondents belong to the online panel owned and administered by SSI. Notice of IRB Exemption Protocol #E16-292 is kept on file at the Office of Research and Regulatory Affairs of Rutgers University.

  11. To isolate the risks and costs associated with engaging in any illegal activity, the next phrase was included: “assuming you would not go to jail.”

  12. See “Appendix” for wording.

  13. Blair and Imai (2012, p. 54) explain that asking the direct question to individuals in the treated group might bias the results.

  14. See “Appendix” for wording.

  15. Holland and Palmer-Rubin (2015, p. 1189) explain that “the poor are thought to be more susceptible to vote buying.”

  16. Since one of the two sentences was added, item (3) download your favorite music from the Internet illegally was moved to the fourth place.

  17. The experimental design passes the standard tests for design effects (floor and ceiling effects). See Table 3.

  18. Morton and Williams (2010, p. 98) explain that the treatment should be invariant or “stable.”

  19. I thank the anonymous reviewer at Acta Politica for this suggestion.

  20. The R package list was used (Blair 2015). The estimation method used was the “ml” and the maximum number of iterations was 200,000. The remaining arguments of the package were left at their default values.

  21. Since the estimated quantities do not vary across the different treatments (“low” and “high”), it is reasonable to think that there are no specific concerns associated with the (arbitrarily) chosen prices.

  22. This number was calculated averaging over the “high” (27%) and “low” (23%) estimates.

  23. This number was calculated averaging over the “high” (19%) and “low” (17%) estimates.

  24. This number was calculated averaging over the “high” (8%) and “low” (7%) estimates.

  25. With just a constant 1 on the right-hand side of the equation.

  26. I thank the two anonymous reviewers of Acta Politica for stimulating this discussion.

  27. Similarly, see Abramo and Speck (2001, p. 14). For the Philippine case, see Schaffer (2004).

  28. In fact, there is some anecdotal evidence suggesting that a broker purchased one man’s vote for $800 during the 2010 elections in eastern Kentucky (Shawn 2012, p. 6).

  29. My emphasis.

  30. Relatedly, González-Ocantos et al. (2014, p. 205) and Corstange (2012, p. 494) also find very weak results for education in Peru and Nicaragua, and in Lebanon, respectively.

  31. I owe this point to Christopher Chambers-Ju.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Virginia Oliveros, Richard Lau, David Redlawsk, Christopher Chambers-Ju, Jessica Price, Maria Akchurin, the 2016 Experimental Research Group in Political Psychology at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, the Social Sciences Seminar at O’Higgins University, and the two anonymous reviewers at Acta Politica for their comments. This project was funded by the Center for the Experimental Study of Psychology and Politics at Rutgers University—New Brunswick. Bastián Garrido provided excellent research assistance. Usual caveats apply.

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    Héctor Bahamonde

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Appendix

Appendix

Experimental manipulations and vignettes

Distractor paragraph. The next paragraph was used to distract subjects from the main purpose of the study, and also to define vote selling.

figure b

Direct Question. All subjects read the next paragraph, and then all answered the direct question:

figure c
figure d

Testing for design effects

See Table 3.

Table 3 Test for list experiment design effects
Full size table

Geographical distribution of survey respondents

See Fig. 6.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Geographical distribution of survey respondents by party identification

Full size image

Individual predictions

The vertical axis of Fig. 7 shows the estimated probabilities of the entire experimental sample, sorted across the horizontal axis. The figure is relevant as it openly shows the amount of uncertainty of the statistical estimates. Ultimately, these individual-specific predictions will be used to profile likely vote sellers.

Fig. 7
figure 7

Individual estimated probabilities of vote selling. Note figure shows the individual probabilities of vote selling (\(N = 1479\)) under the “low” and “high” conditions. After fitting the model, and following the advice of Blair and Imai (2012) and Imai et al. (2015), individual probabilities of vote selling under the “low” and “high” conditions were estimated. The figure also shows 95% confidence intervals

Full size image

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Bahamonde, H. Still for sale: the micro-dynamics of vote selling in the United States, evidence from a list experiment. Acta Polit 57, 73–95 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00174-4

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