health services outside of clientelist practices. This argument was made in the previous section, on the basis of the institutional setting in the Philippines, which allows for exploiting microlevel, idiosyncratic variation in vote buying across municipalities within the same province, keeping big, macro-level political, socio-economic, and institutional factors fixed.

Second, the analysis at the village level has the degrees of freedom and rich survey data to explore a large number of specifications, with different combinations of variables in the Wijk and Zjkvectors, to test that the correlation between health services and vote buying is not driven by other, observable, factors. This includes, of course, the variables found to be systematically correlated with vote buying in this sample (in the previous section): the congressional district fixed effects, dominance of political clans, and the indicator variables for the economic power of the mayor’s family. The analysis also tests for robustness to measuring vote buying using two different survey questions, as presented in the previous section.

Third, concern that unobserved factors might mechanistically drive the correlation, independent of clientelism, is allayed by differentiating the sources for measuring vote buying versus health service delivery. The measures of municipal service delivery are gathered from official government records, and from government respondents, while vote buying is measured through household surveys. This makes it unlikely that unobserved factors that drive household responses to potentially sensitive questions on vote buying are accounting for the correlation with service delivery, since the primary source for measuring service delivery is external to the household.

Fourth, the correlation of vote buying with other services is explored, where higher tier politicians can play an important and perhaps even larger role, and which might be relatively more “targetable”. These services serve as “placebo” tests because municipal vote buying should not be as robustly or significantly correlated with those services where outcomes depend upon the actions of multiple agents, or that are more compatible with or complementary to clientelist political practices. Political conditions at the municipal-level may not matter in the same way to higher-tier politicians, leading to more noise in the correlation between municipal political variables and delivery of services where multiple political agents are involved. Furthermore, for these other services, where the actions of higher tier politicians matter, mayors have less of a trade-off with clientelist transfers-- the resources and funds can come from elsewhere. Services that can be used for clientelist targeting, or to capture rents from public office might go hand-inhand with vote buying practices.

With spurious correlation-- for example, if public services were just too difficult to deliver to some villages because of their location, and location also enables vote-buying practices, location would drive both vote-buying and low services, with no direct connection between the two. However, as will be shown in the results section below, the correlation of vote buying with other types of services, where higher tier politicians can play a role, or, that are relatively more amenable to clientelist targeting and elite capture, is not robustly significant, and in some cases, of opposite sign (than the negative correlation with municipal health services). The pattern of evidence is difficult to reconcile with any other explanation than weak political incentives to deliver broad, pro-poor services when political competition is more clientelist.

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