household surveys is then correlated with health service measures from a completely different source: official government records. Additional supporting evidence is provided from householdlevel measures of access to health services. The robust negative correlation with vote buying, therefore, holds for health services measured from there different sources: village health facility records, municipal budgets, and household interviews.

Other types of policy instruments—roads and infrastructure projects, and targeted assistance to households in time of need—that can be heavily influenced by higher-tier politicians outside the municipality, serve to perform “placebo” tests, to rule out accidental or spurious correlation. Municipal vote buying should not be as significantly or robustly correlated with those services where outcomes are heavily dependent on the actions of other politicians.<sup>9</sup> Furthermore, these other policy instruments might be more “targetable” than health services, and therefore more compatible with clientelist political strategies than broadly delivered services.<sup>10</sup> Roads or infrastructure projects, are also useful comparators to health services because they have been described as particularly amenable to elite and political capture in the Philippines and elsewhere (Matsuda and Cruz, 2012; Keefer and Knack, 2007; Khemani, 2012).

If the correlation between vote buying and service delivery is spuriously driven by unobserved conditions, that simultaneously make service delivery harder and vote buying easier, then similar correlations could be observed across different types of services, regardless of the extent to which the service is controlled by municipal politicians or amenable to clientelist targeting and elite capture. This is not the case, as will be discussed in detail in the sections further below—vote buying is robustly correlated with a particular type of health policy instrument over which municipalities exert direct and exclusive control. The data show an oppositely-signed correlation of vote buying with targeted assistance to households and with mayoral roads projects in the sampled villages—positive, though not always statistically significant.

In sum, the finding that municipal vote buying is robustly correlated with lower levels of a particular type of service having the following characteristics—being exclusively within municipal control, being pro-poor (the rich tend not to use the health services that municipalities provide), and being a broadly delivered service that is (relatively) less amenable to targeting—is difficult to brush-off as spurious correlation, or to explain through alternate mechanisms, other than as an equilibrium policy consequence of clientelist practices.

This empirical evidence is consistent with a general class of theories of clientelism with regard to its equilibrium policy consequences: that clientelism reduces investments in public goods, and/or in broad, pro-poor public services. Vote buying, in which particularistic benefits are provided at the time of elections, has been argued to be especially perverse, in that it can

> 9 This is not to claim that vote buying is more important to municipal politicians; but rather, that the particular jurisdictional boundary of a municipality is more important to municipal politicians. Higher tier politicians can buy votes across municipalities to reach their electoral goals. Although, other evidence from the Philippines suggests that the particular clientelist practice of offering money for votes at the time of elections may be especially salient in municipal politics (Schaffer, 2007, pp 195).

> 10 Chen and Cammett (2012)  and Nichter (2011) provide evidence from Lebanon and Brazil, respectively, suggesting that heath services too can be used in clientelist targeting. The paper discusses this issue in detail in the sections below.

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