Does Improving Electoral Access Facilitate Clientelism? A Reassessment of Theory and Evidence
P5-02
Presented by: Andy Harris
Independent election commissions typically seek to ensure voters have easy access to the polls. One approach to this is polling station proliferation: creating new polling stations to ensure that voters do not have to travel too far to vote, and that when they arrive their wait is not too long. Multiple recent studies in political science argue that one effect of polling station proliferation is to increase electoral clientelism and corruption, through either vote buying or turnout buying. In this paper, we reassess the theory and evidence behind these claims. We first demonstrate that the evidence for a causal effect of polling station proliferation on vote buying is weak. We then argue that the evidence for turnout buying is consistent with a simpler explanation. Voters respond to lower travel and wait times by being more likely to vote; underlying distributions of partisanship in the population explain heterogeneous effects for different parties.