Seminario CEDE - Oskar Nupia

How do political parties decide how to allocate campaign resources between vote-buying and traditional campaigning? This decision ultimately determines the presence and extent of vote-buying. Nevertheless, we lack a proper understanding of how this decision is made. This paper aims to fill this gap by building a political competition model with two political parties, brokers, and expressive and non-expressive citizens who value political ideology and public goods. The results provide new insights into the factors that lead to decreased vote buying, particularly the degree of expressiveness of voters who are not involved in the vote-buying market and the mobilization technologies of parties. By taking these new elements into account, we can devise new strategies that  may be helpful in reducing the level of vote-buying.