Can Anti-Corruption Campaigns Reduce Vote Buying? Lessons from Brazil’s Municipal Audits
Insights into Brazil's elections: a VoxDev column by Gustavo Bobonis, Paul Gertler, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro & Simeon Nichter examining how transparency initiatives can weaken clientelism.
Brazil rolled out a nationwide audit programme that publicly scrutinized how thousands of municipalities used federal funds, with publicly released findings. Researchers combined this random assignment of audits with a unique panel survey conducted among rural households in the semi-arid zone of Northeast Brazil, providing a natural experiment on how anti-corruption efforts affect participation in clientelist exchanges by both politicians and citizens.