Buying Votes vs. Supplying Public Services : Political Incentives to Under-invest in Pro-poor Policies
This paper uses unique survey data to provide, for the first time in the literature, direct evidence that vote buying in poor economies is associated with lower provision of public services that disproportionately benefit the poor. Various features...
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/01/17200957/buying-votes-vs-supplying-public-services-political-incentives-under-invest-pro-poor-policies http://hdl.handle.net/10986/13126 |
| Summary: | This paper uses unique survey data to
provide, for the first time in the literature, direct
evidence that vote buying in poor economies is associated
with lower provision of public services that
disproportionately benefit the poor. Various features of the
data and the institutional context allow the interpretation
of this correlation as the equilibrium policy consequence of
clientelist politics, ruling out alternate explanations
(such as, for example, poverty driving both vote buying and
health outcomes). The data come from the Philippines, a
country context that allows for measuring vote buying during
elections and services delivered by the administrative unit
controlled by winners of those elections. The data reveal a
significant, robust negative correlation between vote buying
and the delivery of primary health services. In places where
households report more vote buying, government records show
that municipalities invest less in basic health services for
mothers and children; and, quite strikingly, as a summary
measure of weak service delivery performance, a higher
percentage of children are severely under-weight. |
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