Replication Data for \"Measuring the Returns of Vote Buying: A Null Effect\"

Building on Francisco Cantú’s 2019 paper \"Groceries for Votes: The Electoral Returns of Vote Buying,” we reconsider the efficacy of a vote buying scheme in the 2012 Mexican Presidential Elections in which voters were given gift cards in exchange for their support. The author’s initial analysis rests on the assumption that the distance between one’s precinct and the store where the gift card is valid is exogenous to political beliefs. Here, the author uses distance to a store where one can redeem a gift card a proxy for one’s opportunity cost for having their vote bought. We find that this is not the case, as new measures of distance show a correlation between distance and political awareness and beliefs. Further, we find evidence of model dependence, dependent on the metric of distance used. We conclude that it is not possible to leverage distance as a measure of the perceived utility of a vote buying effort. As such, we find that it is not possible to determine whether this 2012 vote buying scheme was effective using the current data.