Buying a Ballot: Vote Brokers in Southeast Asia

How are votes bought in contemporary democracies? Allen Hicken, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, explores this very question in his research.

Recent work published in World Politics finds that in democracies with weak political parties, vote buying tends to take the form of buying brokers, or local middlemen that connect candidates to voters. Most theories of vote brokerage see brokers as important as sources of information or for their role in the enforcement of vote buying. However, Hicken and his coauthors argue that candidates buy brokers for their social networks. They contend that candidates strategically choose brokers who distribute handouts to key constituencies—groups that candidates need to show they value or use to signal their electoral viability. They developed this theory of brokerage based on extensive interview data gathered from Indonesia, a country with a relatively weak party system. To further test and refine, they used evidence from surveys, focus-group discussions, and analyses of brokers' lists of voters targeted for handouts.

Other research published in the American Political Science Review uses voter surveys in the Philippines to measure social networks, social preferences, and vote buying. This study identifies two distinct strategies that brokers employ to enforce vote buying and distribute handouts. In villages with dense social networks, brokers select well-connected voters who are easy to monitor. In contrast, in villages with sparse networks, brokers opt for voters they trust to reciprocate without the need for oversight. To read more about his work on electoral brokers in the Global South, check out his award-winning book on the topic, which expands scope beyond the Philippines to study Southeast Asia more broadly.

In addition to his work on the role of brokers in elections, Hicken is also a co-principal investigator (alongside fellow U-M Political Science Professor Ken Kollman) for the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA), a repository of election results for legislative elections around the world.