Electoral clientelism and vote buying are widely perceived as major obstacles to economic development. This is because they may limit the provision of public goods. In this paper, we review the literature on clientelism and vote buying and propose the use of field experiments to evaluate...

This article studies the role of political distortions in driving economic growth and development in Africa. We first discuss how existing theories based on long-run structural factors (e.g., pre-colonial and colonial institutions, or ethnic diversity) may not capture new data patterns in the...

In this paper, we present a critical survey of experiments on political clientelism and vote-buying. We claim that through randomization and control, field experiments represent an important tool for answering causal questions, whereas list experiments provide useful methods that improve the...