Abstract

I analyze an electoral model where voters exert efforts on behalf of one candidate or another but not both. A voter also receives benefits from her neighbors that support the same candidate as she supports. A candidate's campaign can influence voters either by vote buying (i.e., offering a wage for efforts) or by acting violently. The type of violence available to a campaign depends upon its social embeddedness (i.e., what it knows about the voters' preferences and place in a social network). When embeddedness is low, campaigns can only use violence to increase the costs of public efforts on behalf of its opponent. When embeddedness is high, violence can be targeted at the opposition's patronage network, reducing the indirect flows of patronage between voters. In the former case, vote buying and violence are substitutes in producing turnout; in the latter they are complements.

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