Brokering Votes with Information Spread Via Social Networks
59 Pages Posted: 9 Sep 2019 Last revised: 23 Sep 2019
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Brokering Votes with Information Spread via Social Networks
Date Written: September 2019
Abstract
Throughout much of the developing world, politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes prior to elections. We investigate how social networks help facilitate vote-buying exchanges by combining village network data of brokers and voters with broker reports of vote buying. We show that networks diffuse politically-relevant information about voters to brokers who leverage it to target voters. In particular, we find that brokers target reciprocal voters who are not registered to their party and about whom they can hear more information through their social network. These results highlight the importance of information diffusion through social networks for vote buying and ultimately for political outcomes.
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Brokering Votes with Information Spread Via Social Networks
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