“Vote-Buying Is Wrong, but…”: Conditioning Vote-Buying Norms in Brazil

• In Event: Assessing Democratic Brazil: Institutions, Traditional Politics and New Issues

Abstract

Vote-buying is still considered one of the most detrimental dynamics to electoral democracies and systematically denounced by civil society and political actors in developing countries. Despite being widely recognized by voters as a socially undesirable practice when seen as a pure economic transaction, recent research on clientelism shows that vote-buying very often is embedded in a broader social context of repeated interactions between patron and clients. Particularly in contexts where socio-economic inequalities are strongly linked to climate-based vulnerabilities, normative views on vote-buying can be attenuated by an understanding of vote-buying and clientelism as part of a strategy for survival. In this paper, we explore the results of a vignette experiment embedded in a survey (n=3,600) conducted in 90 municipalities of Brazilian northeastern semi-arid zone in combination with four field work trips to the region conducted between 2017 and 2019. Prone to cyclical periods of severe drought, this region has been historically characterized by electoral clientelism built around the vulnerability of voters to the effects of extreme weather. Our results show that, despite condemning vote-buying, respondents are more likely to condition their disapproval based on the climate-based vulnerability and the electoral leaning of the hypothetical client. Moreover, contrary to some previous research, our results indicate that lower levels of income and education contribute to lower levels of vote-buying condemnation. Our results highlight the need to understand the specific contexts in which clientelism takes place for assessing voter’s normative views about electoral malpractices.

Author

• Yuri Kasahara, Oslo Metropolitan University