characteristics might matter either at a more macro level, with sufficiently large variation in poverty across larger jurisdictions; or, alternately, at a more micro-level, such as targeting the poorest households within a village (as in the arguments of Stokes, 2007). The main purpose here, however, is not to contribute to the existing literature on the targeting of vote buy offers across households; rather, to contribute the first evidence of the correlation between jurisdictionlevel variation in the prevalence of vote buying with jurisdiction-level measures of service delivery.

Other socio-economic variables are also explored—the degree to which vote buying practices might be correlated with the level of social capital or local collective action in communities (using survey measures of a particular institution for local collective action and mutual assistance in the Philippines, described in Labonne and Chase, 2011—participation in _bayanihan_ ); whether the mayor is able to claim political affiliation with a larger number of politicians, thereby having access to wider networks to enable vote buying to be an effective political strategy; and, location and population of villages. None of these variables exhibit a robustly significant correlation with vote buying. This is shown in column (5)-(7) of Table 1.

Column (6) adds an indicator variable for whether the incumbent mayor is in her 3<sup>rd</sup> term in office, and therefore ineligible for stand for re-election because of a term limit. In elections with lame-duck mayors, it may be that more challengers emerge and use vote buying strategies to compete. However, the data show no significant evidence of this, although the coefficient sign is indeed positive.

Column (7) adds a measure of municipal dependency on fiscal transfers from the national government. Recent work, with data from Brazil, has suggested that greater fiscal dependency can act like a “political resource curse”, reducing the quality of local politicians (Brollo et al, 2013). In municipalities where national fiscal transfers constitute the vast bulk of local revenues political challengers might be more willing to invest their resources into vote buying, in anticipation of accessing public resources coming from above, and hence not relying on local taxation. The data do not show any evidence of this, however.

In sum, a highly detailed scrutiny of the sources of variation in vote buying practices, applying the available theory to very rich survey data, finds a few variables to be robustly significant and with considerable explanatory power—congressional district fixed effects, measures of clan domination in local politics, and indicators of mayoral economic powers. In column (2) of Table 1, these variables together explain 33 percent of the variation in reported vote buying across municipalities. Adding more variables does not change the R-square substantially, as can be seen from subsequent columns. In contrast, social or economic variables that one might expect to be systematically correlated with both vote buying and health service delivery, possibly driving a spurious correlation between the two, are not robust correlates of the variation in vote buying.

The informative value of these correlations for our main purpose (of examining the equilibrium policy consequences of vote buying politics) is the suggestion that the sources of variation in vote buying in this sample (almost all municipalities within one province) are likely to be idiosyncratic and not systematically correlated with factors that could have independent correlation with health services (outside of the channel of clientelism). Vote buying might be 14