What underlying logic explains candidate participation in vote buying, given that clientelist exchange is so difficult to enforce? We address this question through close analysis of campaigns by several dozen candidates in two electoral districts in Java, Indonesia. Analyzing candidates’ targeting and pricing strategies, we show that candidates used personal brokerage structures that drew on social networks to identify voters and deliver payments to them. But these candidates achieved vote totals averaging about one quarter of the number of payments they distributed. Many candidates claimed to be targeting loyalists, suggestive of “turnout buying,” but judged loyalty in personal rather than partisan terms, and extended their vote-buying reach through personal connections mediated by brokers. Candidates were market sensitive, paying prices per vote determined not only by personal resources, but also by constituency size and prices offered by competitors. Accordingly, we argue that a market logic structures Indonesia's system of vote buying.

When citizens are offered cash and gifts by candidates, they can either vote for candidates offering the money, refuse the money, or take the money and vote for whichever candidate they prefer (e.g., “vote their conscience”). Which citizens “vote their conscience” versus the other options available to them? This manuscript examines the effect of poverty, education, and social pressure on how citizens in the Central Java city of Semarang, Indonesia react to offers of cash from politicians. We find that poverty and education interact to create important and interesting patterns of responses. The citizens most likely to “vote their conscience” are those with lower income yet higher levels of formal education whereas higher income, more highly educated citizens are most likely to refuse the money. We also examine factors that create social pressure for citizens to “sell” their votes by supporting the candidates offering cash.

A commonly proffered theory to explain the use of elections in authoritarian regimes is that they help identify talented young leaders who can be groomed for leadership positions. Unfortunately, due to the difficulties of obtaining data in authoritarian settings, this hypothesis has not been tested satisfactorily. We examine candidate-level data from the 2007 Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA) election and subsequent selection of candidates for top positions within the VNA and for top ministry positions. We find no evidence that vote share is associated with promotion to leadership positions in the VNA and only limited evidence for vote share association with ministerial posts. Instead, the results indicate that leadership selection takes place within the party rather than through elections. Furthermore, behavior within the assembly suggests that those who were chosen may have been selected based on their loyalty or at least pliancy to the party elites.

Migration to electoral autocracies has become increasingly common. Extant studies, however, accord little attention to the immigrants' influences on the domestic politics of these regimes. We argue that immigrants have attributes (status quo bias and lack of prior exposure to local politics) that make them an attractive co-optation target of the authoritarian regime. We provide a case study of mainland Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong to illustrate our argument. Since the sovereignty transfer, the Hong Kong government has devised various schemes to attract these immigrants, while pro-establishment political parties and groups have actively sought to co-opt them. Using two distinct public opinion surveys, we also find that immigrants are more likely to approve of the political and economic status quo, and less likely to vote for pro-democracy opposition parties than the natives. In addition, we find no evidence that exposure to political information can change the immigrants' vote choice.

Village elections are a democratic institution in one of the most resilient authoritarian regimes in the world. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has promoted village elections over the past twenty years, but not elections at higher levels. I present a game-theoretic model in which candidates would engage in vote buying when competing in a small electorate but not when competing in a larger electorate. The model's equilibrium outcome implies that the logic of China's introduction of village elections inherently limits this democratic reform to the grassroots level. Elections for higher levels of government would be dangerous to the regime because they would lead candidates to create substantive policy platforms and political organizations. Thus, rather than being an experiment that has failed to lead to further reforms, village democracy is self-limiting by design.

In this article I seek to explain the microfoundations of patronage politics in the developing world. Two distinct approaches have evolved in the literature. One puts emphasis on the demand side, arguing that patronage persists because poor voters tend to desire individualistic goods over policy. The other focuses on the supply side: few politicians offer programmatic policy, so voters have no alternative but to vote for the politicians who distribute patronage. In this study I test those competing theories using original data from Jakarta, Indonesia. I find evidence supporting the demand-side theory: when both patronage and policy are offered, poor, less-educated voters tend to demand patronage, such as jobs and money, over national programs like free education and universal health care, whereas well-off, better-educated voters tend to prefer the national policies. However, the study also reveals that demands for patronage are affected by level of participation in politics: those who voted in previous elections and those who affiliate with a political party are more likely to demand patronage. This microfoundational evidence helps to explain the persistence of patronage politics in places of widespread poverty.

The People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore is one of the world's longest ruling dominant parties, having won every general election since the country's independence in 1965. Why do Singaporeans consistently vote for the PAP, contrary to the expectations of democratization theories? We argue that valence considerations—specifically, perceptions of party credibility—are the main factor in the voting behavior of Singapore's electorate, and are critical to explaining the PAP's resilience. Furthermore, we argue that the primacy of valence politics arose in part by design, as the PAP has used its control of Singapore's high-capacity state to reshape society and thereby reshape voter preferences towards its comparative advantages. We use a multi-methods approach to substantiate this argument, including a comprehensive quantitative analysis of recent elections. Ultimately, our findings suggest that a focus on valence politics can increase the resilience of dominant parties, but that such a strategy also faces natural limits.

The absence of class voting or the existence of “reverse” class voting under rising inequality remains a puzzling question in South Korea. While poor voters seem to support conservative candidates more than the rich do, this is due to a confounding effect of age, because poverty is concentrated among the elderly in Korea. Using the Korean General Social Survey data (KGSS 2004–2014) covering two presidential elections, two general legislative elections, and two nationwide local elections, we find that Koreans, in particular the poor electorate, engage in class voting in both objective and subjective terms. While regional and generational cleavages continue to be the most important determinants of partisan competition, class by income levels as well as subjective identity significantly impact vote choice when age is adequately controlled for.

This article utilizes an original household survey of two regency-level elections in Indonesia to explore campaign targeting. It uses a list experiment to show that direct survey questions about accepting transfers from campaigns elicit honest responses from respondents in Indonesia. Although the relationship between income and whether a respondent accepted transfers from political campaigns decreases over the entire distribution of income, it increases initially, producing a curvilinear relationship between income and accepting transfers from campaigns. This article argues that the poorest voters face barriers to being targeted by campaigns. However, these barriers recede as they become relatively richer, at which point a negative relationship is found due to diminishing marginal utility of accepting these transfers. Finally, in-kind transfers, as opposed to cash transfers, target low-income voters more effectively.

Are Taiwanese voters polarized? By presenting four novel visualizations based on a factor analysis of Taiwan National Security Surveys from 2002 to 2017, this article describes the contours of structural change in Taiwan politics. Overall, the cross-strait position among Taiwanese voters can be described by a stable inverted U shape over time. This arises from the fact that most nonpartisans—typically neglected in the literature on polarization—are moderate. Before 2008, increasing polarization among partisans can be attributed to pan-green voters moving toward independence. Between 2008 and 2014, decreasing polarization stems from moderates self-identifying as pan-blue supporters. Since 2014, a record-breaking number of nonpartisans have left the pan-blue camp, and more extreme pan-blue voters have contributed to a return of polarization among partisans. The results yield important implications for the study of polarization and populism, as well as for the future of Taiwanese politics.