Finally, a potential problem with interpreting the correlation coefficients is the timing of measuring vote buying versus measuring service delivery. The service delivery data specifically measures municipal actions over the past few years, during the term in office of the current incumbent. In the vote buying question posed to households, no particular date of elections was specified. The survey was undertaken three months before impending municipal elections, and three years after the last elections.<sup>28</sup> The question could therefore pick-up vote buying practices for the upcoming elections, although 3 months might be too long a lead time to already observe vote buying contracts. The follow-up questions asked specifically about actual voting behavior, which suggests that respondents would understand the vote buying question as relating to experience over past elections. Even if different respondents have different timing in mind when answering the vote buying question—some reflecting experience in past elections, and some their expectation from the upcoming elections—this measure of vote buying can still capture how vote buying is persistently more likely, across elections, in some municipalities than in others.

Nevertheless, one concern is that of reverse causation—vote buying in impending elections may be more likely in municipalities with a poor past record of health service delivery. The incumbent may be using vote buying to win political support, in lieu of the provision of broad public services. Challengers may be using vote buying because it is cheaper or more effective when incumbent performance has been weak. However, this interpretation runs against the evidence of no correlation with vote buying of other types of service delivery, including highly sensational forms of natural disaster assistance (reported in Khemani, 2013).

In the argument made here—that the survey measure of vote buying captures variation across municipalities in the proclivity towards using particularistic benefits as the basis of political support—the timing of vote buying is not important to interpreting the correlation as the equilibrium policy outcome of clientelism. A sequence of events where vote buying strategies are heightened following weak incumbent performance in delivering pro-poor services is not inconsistent with this interpretation since it reflects a direct trade-off between buying votes versus supplying broad public services.

# **5. Results**

This section reports a significant negative correlation between vote buying and health services that is robust to a vast array of different specifications of the type in (2) and (3). It also reports lack of robust correlation of vote buying with other types of closely related services that are not exclusively or even largely within municipal control, and that might be more complementary to clientelist political strategies, which serves as a defense against charges of spurious correlation.

Table 2a shows the main results of estimating equation (2), for village-level measures of health services. Vote buying is significantly associated with a larger number of children in the barangay recorded as having weight that is well below normal. It is also associated with fewer barangay health workers and fewer health projects in the barangay. The indicator of mayoral economic power also tends to be associated with a higher proportion of children with below

> 28 Municipal elections in the Philippines are held every three years.

18