in the “other” category, which contains most construction projects in the local development fund, on the left hand side of equation (3). Vote buying tends to be positively correlated with mayoral roads projects in the sampled villages, though not always statistically significant. The point estimate on vote buying in the case of municipal project spending is also positive, though not statistically significant.

These results for roads projects are far from conclusive, not least because it is particularly difficult to measure when a construction project delivers a broad public good versus serving as a vehicle for rent extraction. Furthermore, the current format of the statement of income and expenditures to report local fiscal allocations is not conducive to precisely isolating spending on construction. If vote buying is enabling politicians to get-away with capturing rents from public office, or skewing public resources towards services that the elite prefer, uncovering this evidence is much harder because it is difficult to measure when public resources are being thus captured. Furthermore, such types of capture may be spread-out and hidden across multiple instruments precisely to escape detection. That is, there are reasons why uncovering an equilibrium correlation of vote buying with a broad pro-poor public service, that is exclusively and prominently within municipal control, would be empirically feasible, while uncovering the correlation with rents capture would be far more challenging. Nevertheless, these additional results help to defend the main correlation of vote buying with health services against charges of spurious correlation.

Another paper examines variation across these Philippine municipalities in the delivery of targeted assistance to households in times of need (Khemani, 2013). This policy instrument is distinguished from municipal health services in two ways—higher-tier politicians are heavily involved in delivering assistance, and, such assistance has been described as a classic tool for clientelist targeting (Weitz-Shapiro, 2012). In this case too, as in roads, vote buying tends to be positively associated with receiving assistance in times of need (reported in Khemani, 2013).

That is, vote buying is systematically negatively correlated with a particular type of service with the following characteristics—that which is the exclusive responsibility of municipal governments, that which is pro-poor (services which the rich don’t use), and that which is a relatively broad, untargeted service, not particularly amenable to narrow targeting to select citizens. The correlation holds for a wide variety of measures of health services, obtained from three different sources: village health records, municipal budgets, and household interviews.

# **6. Discussion: Implications for theory and development policy**

Although theories of clientelism and vote buying have generally suggested that the practice of targeting benefits to voters in direct exchange for political support is likely to have pernicious consequences, there has been little detailed analysis of the mechanisms for this. Indeed, in the context of the Philippines, Schaffer (2005) has suggested that vote buying might be reflective of the responsiveness of politicians to poor and vulnerable citizens in particular. Vote buying need not be manipulative, but rather a reflection of how demanding are voters, to which governments may respond along multiple dimensions, giving gifts at election time, and all kinds of services at other times. This paper’s contribution is empirical—providing the first robust evidence that vote buying is associated with lower investments in a particular type of public 22