of respondents report being offered money, ranging from no one reporting such offers, to 75 percent of respondents reporting them.<sup>22</sup> Some features of the vote buying data suggest that it is suited to measuring actual differences across municipalities in the extent to which elections can be won or lost on the basis of vote buying. Among the respondents that answered that they were offered money, 84 percent said they accepted the money, and of these, 51 percent said they voted for the candidate from whom they accepted the offer. This is substantially higher than the evidence from national surveys that is reported by Schaffer (2005). Interpreting the number is difficult however, because of possible social desirability bias in answering that money was accepted without compromising voter rights. Nevertheless, the significant share of respondents that are willing to admit to voting for the candidate from whom they accepted money, suggests that the survey measure is a good proxy for the extent to which elections revolve around the exchange of particularistic benefits.

Table 1 reports the results of estimating equation (1) for various different specifications changing the composition of the correlates contained in the vector X. Some variables exhibited a more robust correlation than others, maintaining their statistical significance across multiple types of specifications. These, more robust correlates represent some of the more important variables in the received literature examining the drivers of vote buying. Each is discussed below in turn.

Medina and Stokes (2002) argue that local economic power is likely to be associated with forms of clientelist exchange other than vote buying, for example, through the leasing of land for cultivation, or the provision of a job. Such models therefore predict lower direct vote buying, offers of money in exchange for votes, at election time, where politicians control economic resources and can use “relational” forms of clientelism (Nichter, 2011).<sup>23</sup> The survey gathered data from key informants at the municipal level (typically consisting of a local business leader, a journalist, a religious leader, or a functionary in the local government office) on whether the mayor’s family is a major land-holder or employer of labor in the municipality. These variables are some of the more robust and significant correlates of vote buying in the data.<sup>24</sup> In municipalities where the mayor’s family is reported as being a major employer of labor, or major landowners, there are significantly fewer reported instances of vote buying. This suggests that local economic power and vote buying may generate substitute types of clientelism.

These alternate measures of perhaps a different form of clientelism—arising from the monopoly economic power of local politicians—could be correlated with health services independently of vote buying. As we report further below, these measures tend to be negatively correlated with health services, although the correlation is not robustly significant across different specifications. Their inclusion in the specification has no impact on the estimated

> 22 These reported rates of vote buying are extraordinarily high when compared to direct survey measures from other countries (Gonzalez-Ocantos et al, 2012). Detailed qualitative evidence from the Philippines show why the social desirability bias there is likely to be far lower than in other country contexts (Schaffer, 2005, 2007).

> 23 Baland and Robinson (2006) coin the term “indirect vote buying” for the clientelism associated with economic power, when employers or landowners can coerce their workers to vote for particular political parties.

> 24 There are only a few specifications in which the coefficient on mayoral economic power is not significant even at the 10 percent level. These are the cases when other socio-economic characteristics of villages are included, as in column (5)-(7). However, the sign of the coefficient remains negative.

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