Los aparatos partidarios y las estrategias de recompensas personalizadas para los votantes

Previous works on vote-buying have highlighted than an informational advantage allows party machines to efficiently distribute discretionary transfers to voters. However, the microfoundations that allow party machines to electorally exploit their informational advantage have not yet been elucidated. The probabilistic model in this paper provides the microfounded mechanism that 1 Rodrigo Zarazaga es Director e investigador principal del Centro de Investigación y Acción Social CIAS e investigador adjunto de CONICET. explains how party machines translate, with a voter-customized strategy, their informational advantage into more efficient allocation of discretionary transfers and win elections with higher probabilities than their contenders. Furthermore, its probabilistic design allows the model to account for why party machines target their own supporters with discretionary transfers. In depthinterviews with 120 brokers from Argentina motivate this model. Political history is full of successful electoral machines. Well-known examples include Daley’s machine in Chicago, the Revolutionary Institutional Party in Mexico, and the Peronist Party in Argentina. Scholars argue that a key element in the electoral success of party machines is their networks of brokers through which they gather better information about voters than their rivals (Rakove 1975; Levitsky 2003; Stokes 2005). Illustratively, Wang and Kurzman say that a Kuomintang broker in Taiwan is a “walking encyclopedia of local knowledge” (2007, 64). Particularly relevant is that brokers know voters’party preferences and degree of support for the available candidates (Stokes et al. 2013; Zarazaga 2014). Surprisingly, none of the models in the growing formal literature on vote-buying formally shows how party machines incorporate their informational advantage into their strategies to win elections. By contrast, this paper makes a contribution by formally showing that party machines exploit their informational advantage and shield their base of support by implementing a "votercustomized strategy”. Through a customized strategy party machines use their private information about voters’ reservation values (i.e., the lowest price at which an individual will “sell”his or her vote) in order to price-discriminate in their allocation of discretionary transfers. The model proves that by implementing this strategy, party machines have a greater probability of electoral success than their counterparts. A major contribution of the paper is to show the microfoundations that allow party machines to exploit their informational advantage. On one hand, some of the most cited formal models on vote-buying ignores party informational advantage and assume that party machines just offer a uniform reward to all voters (Stokes 2005; Nichter 2008). Such strategy would imply a waste of resources as the party machine would be promising the same amount of resources to voters that it knows have different reservation values. On the other hand, other formal models claim their informational advantage allows party machines to effi ciently distribute discretionary transfers to voters, thus acquiring an electoral advantage over their contenders (Cox and McCubbins 1986; Dixit and Londregan 1996). However, these models assume that more complete information automatically translates into a more effi cient allo-