IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecopol/v27y2015i1p124-159.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

He Who Counts Elects: Economic Elites, Political Elites, and Electoral Fraud

Author

Listed:
  • Isaías Chaves
  • Leopoldo Fergusson
  • James A. Robinson

Abstract

type="main" xml:id="ecpo12052-abs-0001"> What determines the extent of electoral fraud? This paper constructs a model of the tradeoff between fraud and policy concessions (public good provision) which also incorporates the strength of the state. In addition, we parameterize the extent to which economic elites (to whom fraud is costly) and political elites (to whom fraud is advantageous) “overlap.” The model predicts that fraud will be lower and public good provision higher when land inequality is higher, the overlap between elites lower, and the strength of the state higher. We test these predictions using a unique, municipal-level dataset from Colombia's 1922 Presidential elections. We find empirical support for all the predictions of the model.

Suggested Citation

  • Isaías Chaves & Leopoldo Fergusson & James A. Robinson, 2015. "He Who Counts Elects: Economic Elites, Political Elites, and Electoral Fraud," Economics and Politics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(1), pages 124-159, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecopol:v:27:y:2015:i:1:p:124-159
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/ecpo.2015.27.issue-1
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Leopoldo Fergusson & Juan F. Vargas, 2023. "Colombia: Democratic but Violent?," Springer Books, in: Felipe Valencia Caicedo (ed.), Roots of Underdevelopment, pages 285-316, Springer.
    2. Leopoldo Fergusson & Juan F. Vargas & Mauricio A. Vela, 2013. "Sunlight disinfects? Free media in weak democracies," Documentos de Trabajo 10484, Universidad del Rosario.
    3. Leonardo Bonilla-Mejía & Iván Higuera-Mendieta, 2018. "Notas sobre la economía política del Caribe colombiano," Revista Economía y Región, Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar, vol. 12(2), pages 7-41, December.
    4. Ananyev, Maxim & Poyker, Michael, 2022. "Do dictators signal strength with electoral fraud?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    5. Leopoldo Fergusson, 2019. "Who wants violence? The political economy of conflict and state building in Colombia," Revista Cuadernos de Economia, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, FCE, CID, vol. 38(78), pages 671-700, November.
    6. Fergusson, Leopoldo & Mejía, Javier & Robinson, James A. & Torres, Santiago, 2023. "Constitutions and Order: A theory and comparative evidence from Colombia and the United States," Documentos CEDE 20815, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ecopol:v:27:y:2015:i:1:p:124-159. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=0954-1985 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.