Vote‐Buying and Reciprocity

While vote‐buying is common, little is known about how politicians determine who to target. We argue that vote‐buying can be sustained by an internalized norm of reciprocity. Receiving money engenders feelings of obligation. Combining survey data on vote‐buying with an experiment‐based measure of reciprocity, we show that politicians target reciprocal individuals. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of social preferences in determining political behavior.     

Committee Decisions with Partisans and Side-Transfers

A dichotomous decision-making context in committees is considered where potential partisan members with predetermined votes can generate inefficient decisions and buy neutral votes. The optimal voting rule minimizing the expected costs of inefficient decisions for the case of a three-member committee is analyzed. It is shown that the optimal voting rule can be non-monotonic with respect to side-transfers: in the symmetric case, majority voting is optimal under either zero, mild or full side-transfer possibilities, whereas unanimity voting may be optimal under an intermediate side-transfer possibility. The side-transfer possibilities depend on the power of partisans (their ability or willingness to pay for neutral votes) relative to the corruptibility of neutral members (personal cost of deliberately casting a `wrong' vote).