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Replication Data for: How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: How Weakly Institutionalized Parties Monitor Brokers in Developing Democracies: Evidence from Postconflict Liberia
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/REXZ8H
 
Creator Bowles, Jeremy
Larreguy, Horacio
Liu, Shelley
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description Political parties in sub-Saharan Africa’s developing democracies are often considered
to lack sufficiently sophisticated machines to monitor and incentivize their political brokers. We challenge this view by arguing that the decentralized pyramidal structure of their machines allows them to engage in broker monitoring and incentivizing to mobilize voters, which ultimately improves their electoral performance. This capacity is concentrated (a) among incumbent parties with greater access to resources and (b) where the scope for turnout buying is higher due to the higher costs of voting. Using post-war Liberia to test our argument, we combine rich administrative data with exogenous variation in parties’ ability to monitor their brokers. We show that brokers mobilize voters en masse to signal effort, that increased monitoring ability improves the incumbent party’s electoral performance, and that this is particularly so in precincts in which voters must travel further to vote and thus turnout buying opportunities are greater.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Clientelism
Brokers
Political parties
 
Contributor Bowles, Jeremy
 
Source Liberia Institute of Statistics and Geo-Information Services, Household Income and Expenditure Survey, 2016. Monrovia, Liberia. Available upon request in person. Accessed June 2017



National Elections Commission, Presidential Election Results, 2005 and 2011. Monrovia, Liberia. Available online at http://www.necliberia.org/. Accessed June 2016



National Elections Commission, National Voter List, 2014. Monrovia, Liberia. Available upon request in person. Accessed June 2016