Social ties amongst lower-income citizens shape support for vote-buying candidates

Across Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, political candidates often attempt to buy the votes of the most socio-economically deprived communities. But new research from Prisca Jöst and Ellen Lust argues that social cohesion in these communities are instrumental in determining the levels of support for candidates who attempt to buy their voters

The Political Participation of the Poor: Local Social Context and the Impact of Social Ties on the Political Engagement of Poor Individuals

Research on political participation finds that poor citizens engage less in politics than wealthy citizens. Yet, recent survey evidence also suggests that there is crucial variation in the poor’s level of engagement within the same country and across neighborhoods and villages. However, most of the existing literature falls short in explaining variation between poor citizens living in different communities. Therefore, we still do not fully understand why some poor citizens are more or less likely to participate than others and the extent to which this may be driven by the local social context and, more specifically, the density of social ties in the community. This dissertation aims to fill this gap in the previous literature by providing a theoretical framework to explain political participation by the poor. Acknowledging a wide range of existing research on social context and political behavior, I argue that poor individuals should be more likely to participate in activities based on social interaction between neighbors or when a social norm of compliance exists within the community. The theoretical expectations suggested are in line with previous scholarship showing that poor individuals are more oriented towards others in their local community and act more pro-socially than wealthy individuals. They are also more reliant on social norms of reciprocity and community-help than the wealthy. Empirical evidence from three individual research papers on Tunisia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the UK highlights the importance of community norms and social ties for the poor's political participation. It also suggests that social sanctioning, bandwagoning and solidarity may explain this relationship

When they believe that their neighbours vote, less affluent citizens are more likely to follow their example than wealthy individuals

Based on research focusing on England, Prisca Jöst finds that the political behaviour of those on lower incomes appears to be more strongly influenced by their neighbours compared to the wealthy. This finding points to the higher importance of a social norm of voting for the less well-off

Receiving more, expecting less? : Social ties, clientelism and the poor’s expectations of future service provision

Do citizens expect candidates who hand out goods at election time to provide services once they take office? The literature provides competing views of the relationship between electoral handouts and service provision. One sees handouts as pre-payment for the vote in lieu of future services; the second understands them as signaling the candidate’s ability to provide future services. In this paper, we examine how electoral handouts may affect expectations of future service provision. We focus on the poor because they are most dependent on such service provision, and on expectations because they are more easily identified and are likely to reflect past experience. We argue the density of social ties within the community should moderate the relationship between candidates’ campaign handouts and expectations of future services. We test this argument using hierarchical models to analyze observational and experimental data from over 14,000 poor Kenyans, Malawians, and Zambians in 631 communities. We find that respondents generally view monetary handouts to be in lieu of future services. However, we also find important differences in communities with more and less dense social ties. Vote-buying is more common and seen as more acceptable in socially dense than in less dense communities. Respondents from socially dense communities are also less likely to expect future service provision; however, they do not see candidates who give handouts as significantly less likely to provide services than those who do not. Indeed, there is evidence that not providing handouts in these communities may signal the candidate’s inability to provide services. These findings highlight the importance of considering how communities’ social density affects expectations over service provision and the need to consider, more broadly, how social context affects the distributive consequences of clientelism.publishe