“Poverty and Clientelism: Do the Poor Embrace Vote Buying?”
 

About the Seminar

The literature on clientelism suggests that the poor are particularly likely to exchange their votes for cash or material goods. Supply-side accounts suggest that candidates are more likely to offer the poor goods in return for their votes because the poor sell their votes at a lower price, are more likely to act reciprocally, and are less likely to see vote buying as morally unacceptable. We know much less about the poor's demand for vote buying, however. Recent studies suggest that the middle class punish vote buying candidates, but assume that the poor welcome offers.

However, the literature from social psychology questions this assumption. We employ a conjoint analysis to examine the poor's preferences over vote buying. We find that offers of immediate, particularistic goods (i.e., vote buying) have a negative effect on the likelihood of poor voters to support the candidate. We argue that this highlights the need to reconsider assumptions regarding the preferences of the poor and the dynamics of clientelism.

About the Presenter

Kristen Kao received her PhD in Political Science in 2015 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Program on Governance and Local Development (GLD) at the University of Gothenburg, where she collaborates with a team of researchers in conducting large N surveys (5,000 respondents or more) in places such as Tunisia, Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia.

Dr. Kao’s book manuscript employs a mixed method approach including a survey of 1,500 eligible voters in Jordan to investigate the effects of electoral institutions on tribal voting behavior, identity-based clientelism, and authoritarian rule in the Middle East. She has spent over four years studying and conducting fieldwork in the Middle East in places as diverse as Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, and Egypt. She has also attained working research fluency in Modern Standard Arabic and the Levantine dialect. Her broader research interests include the study of clientelism, survey methodology, social identity politics, survey experiments, politics of the MENA region, local governance, and voter behavior. Her research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Social Science Research Council, the American Political Science Association, the American Center of Oriental Research, and the Project on Middle East Political Science, among others.  


Date: Wednesday,7 November 2018
Lunch: 12h30 - 13h00, Staff Lounge, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus
Seminar: 13h00 - 14h00, Seminar Room, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus