Vote Buying, Norms, Context, and Trust in Elections

Conventional wisdom says vote buying undermines trust in elections, but few have examined this systematically. We identify why this relationship ought to hold, on average. We also derive two conditioning hypotheses: vote buying will be less consequential among citizens who view these exchanges as positive and in contexts marred by electoral irregularities. We test these three expectations with analyses of cross-national survey data and an original survey experiment. We find only a small and inconsistent relationship between vote buying and electoral trust. We find weak evidence on the role of norms and more support for the notion that context matters. We conclude that a modest connection between vote buying and electoral trust is driven less by approval of vote buying practices and more by variation in how elections are actually conducted and, related, the relative novelty of being exposed to vote buying.