American Political Science Review Vol. 102, No. 1 February 2008 DOI: 10.1017/S0003055408080106 Vote Buying or Turnout Buying? Machine Politics and the Secret Ballot SIMEON NICHTER University of California, Berkeley S cholars typically understand vote buying as offering particularistic benefits in exchange for vote choices. This depiction of vote buying presents a puzzle: with the secret ballot, what prevents individuals from accepting rewards and then voting as they wish? An alternative explanation, which I term “turnout buying,” suggests why parties might offer rewards even if they cannot monitor vote choices. By rewarding unmobilized supporters for showing up at the polls, parties can activate their passive constituencies. Because turnout buying targets supporters, it only requires monitoring whether individuals vote. Much of what scholars interpret as vote buying may actually be turnout buying. Reward targeting helps to distinguish between these strategies. Whereas Stokes’s vote-buying model predicts that parties target moderate opposers, a model of turnout buying predicts that they target strong supporters. Although the two strategies coexist, empirical tests suggest that Argentine survey data in Stokes 2005 are more consistent with turnout buying. INTRODUCTION D uring elections in many world regions, political parties distribute particularistic benefits to in- dividuals. The standard depiction of this prac- tice as “vote buying” presents an intriguing puzzle: how can vote buying coexist with the secret ballot? Scholars typically understand vote buying as offering rewards in exchange for vote choices (e.g., Hicken 2002, 2–3; Lehoucq 2007, 33; Stokes 2005, 315). But if parties are unable to monitor voting decisions, why can’t individ- uals accept rewards and then vote for their preferred candidates anyway? Susan Stokes’s (2005) insightful article, “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Poli- tics with Evidence from Argentina,” greatly advances scholarly research on vote buying by highlighting this commitment problem and offering a plausible solution. Stokes (2005, 315) argues that the Argentine Peronist party uses its “deep insertion in voters’ social net- works” to violate the secret ballot, and is therefore able to enforce compliance when it rewards weakly opposed voters for switching their votes. However, the assumption that parties can monitor actions within the voting booth is often too strin- gent. An alternative explanation, focused on what I term “turnout buying,” provides insight into why par- Simeon Nichter is Ph.D. candidate, Travers Department of Politi- cal Science, 210 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-1950 (Nichter@Berkeley.edu). The author would like to thank Susan Stokes, who in the spirit of advancing academic research on this topic, generously provided her full dataset on vote buying in Argentina. I am grateful to the fol- lowing people for their insightful comments and suggestions: Javier Auyero, Henry Brady, Pradeep Chhibber, David Collier, Miguel de Figueiredo, Thad Dunning, Maysa Eissa, Patrick Egan, Jordan Gans- Morse, Candelaria Garay, Sam Handlin, Sebastian Mazzuca, Suresh Naidu, Paul Pierson, Robert Powell, Philipp Rehm, Neal Richardson, Lee Sigelman, Rodrigo Zarazaga, three anonymous reviewers, and participants in the UC Berkeley Latin American Studies Seminar. Conceptual and formal sections of this paper were presented during the Empirical Implications of Theoretical Models Summer Institute at UC Berkeley (June 13–July 8, 2005). The author also acknowledges the support of the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Education. ties might offer electoral rewards even if they do not compromise ballot secrecy. 1 By rewarding unmobilized supporters for showing up at the polls, parties can acti- vate their own passive constituencies. Turnout buying offers a solution to the secret ballot puzzle, because the strategy does not require monitoring of specific vote choices. Instead, turnout buying requires monitoring whether rewarded individuals vote. Recent elections in the United States provide exam- ples of turnout buying. During the 2004 election, five Democratic Party operatives in East St. Louis were convicted in federal court for offering cigarettes, beer, medicine and $5 to $10 rewards to increase turnout of the poor. One party official pleaded guilty and testified that operatives offered individuals rewards “because if you didn’t give them anything, then they wouldn’t come out.” A local election in Oakland provides another example: campaign workers handed out thousands of coupons for free chicken dinners in an explicit and tar- geted effort to draw voters to the polls. More broadly, observers in various US cities have complained that some politicians use “street money”—–small, unre- ported cash payments ostensibly used for legal get-out- the-vote efforts such as canvassing and transporting voters—–as direct payments for turnout. For example, one journalist examining the use of “street money” in Chicago reports that “members of large families are still ‘hired’ by precinct captains on Election Day for $30 to $50 to make sure voters get to the polls.” Overall, such examples suggest that turnout buying deserves further investigation. 2 Unfortunately, the vote-buying literature rarely con- siders whether particularistic benefits are distributed 1 The author thanks Philipp Rehm for suggesting the term “turnout buying.” 2 Citations for these turnout buying examples are, respectively: Fed- eral Case 05-CR-30044-GPM, Document 183, July 19, 2005, p. 12–13; “Whole Lotta Clucking Going On Over Chicken-Dinner Votes,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 5, 1999; and “‘Street Money’ Litters US Politics; Spreading Cash on Election Day is Alive, Well and Quite Bipartisan,” Boston Globe, November 28, 1993. See also “‘Street Money’ Little More than Voter Bribery,” Atlanta Journal and Con- stitution, November 7, 1997. 19