In many countries around the world, politicians or their agents offer voters selective benefits such as food, cash, building supplies, medical services, and access to education in exchange for political support. Do these vote-buying attempts work? Do recipients vote for their benefactors when they would have voted for a different party otherwise? The answer greatly influences how we think about the quality of democracy in much of the developing world. If vote buying is effective - as existing studies typically assume - then new democracies are rotten at the core and the basic notion that sustains rule by the people is undermined. But if vote buying is not effective, then such criticisms are misplaced and perhaps necessarily damaging to our view of democracy in many countries around the world.
For Fall 2022, my biggest need is help completing a dataset on Mexico's municipalities. Research assistants should be able to read Spanish, be comfortable working in Excel (or Stata) with numerical data, and be very attentive to detail.
ASAP
Collect data from Spanish-language websites and merge or input new data fields into an existing dataset.
