A Market-Equilibrium Approach to Vote-Buying

Vote-buying remains a major impediment to democracy in low-income countries. We propose to evaluate a campaign against vote-buying targeting both the supply and the demand side of the market for votes, ahead of the 2016 election in Uganda. Our experiment will be a randomized saturation design varying the fraction of villages treated at the constituency level. This design will allow us to provide the first estimates of the spillover and local general equilibrium effects of a campaign of this kind and recover estimates for how anti-vote buying campaigns affect not only the incidence of vote buying, but also politician and party behavior.