Data from Rueda (2017)
rueda.RdData from Rueda (2017) AJPS.
Details
Rueda (2017) studies the persistence of vote buying in developing democracies despite the use of secret ballots and argues that brokers condition future payments on published electoral results to enforce these transactions and that this is effective only when the results of small voting groups are available. The study examines the relationship between polling station size and vote buying using three different measures of the incidence of vote buying, two at the municipality level and one at the individual level.
The size of the polling station, predicted by the rules limiting the number of voters per polling station, is used as an instrument of the actual polling place size. The institutional rule predicts sharp reductions in the size of the average polling station of a municipality every time the number of registered voters reaches a multiple of the maximum number of voters allowed to vote in a polling station. Such sharp reductions are used as a source of exogenous variation in polling place size to estimate the causal effect of this variable on vote buying.