Eat Widely, Vote Wisely: Lessons from a Campaign Against Vote Buying in Uganda

Christopher Blattman; Horacio Larreguy; Benjamin Marx; Otis R. Reid

doi:10.3386/w26293

Eat Widely, Vote Wisely: Lessons from a Campaign Against Vote Buying in Uganda

Christopher Blattman, Horacio Larreguy, Benjamin Marx & Otis R. Reid

Working Paper 26293

DOI 10.3386/w26293

Issue Date September 2019

Revision Date January 2026

We study a large-scale intervention designed by civil society organizations to reduce vote buying in Uganda’s 2016 elections. We study this intervention in light of a model where incumbents benefit from a first-mover and campaigning advantage, vote buying and on-the-ground canvassing are complementary, and voter reciprocity increases the effectiveness of vote buying. The intervention undermined reciprocity as well as the drivers of the campaigning advantage of incumbents. As a result, challengers not only canvassed more intensively but also bought more votes in treated locations. Consistent with incumbents being first movers in markets for votes and facing more frictions to adjust their tactics than challengers, their response to the intervention was limited. The intervention ultimately failed to reduce vote buying, but led to short-run electoral gains for challengers and increased service delivery in treated locations.

For implementation we thank the Alliance for Election Campaign Finance Monitoring (ACFIM) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Uganda; we are particularly indebted to Teresa Lezcano Cadwallader, Henry Muguzi, Simon Osborn, and Ivan Tibemanya. We are grateful to Kelsey Barrera, Alex Nawar, and Harrison Pollock for their outstanding research management and assistance in Uganda, to the entire staff at IPA Uganda for ensuring the completion of the survey work, and we thank Peter Deffebach and Patryk Perkowski for excellent research assistance in the United States. We also thank Pia Raffler and Melina Platas Izama for sharing data and providing advice on field operations. We benefited from helpful feedback from Daron Acemoglu, Gustavo Bobonis, Aislinn Bohren, Peter Buisseret, Erika Deserranno, Michael Kremer, Lakshmi Iyer, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, Edmund Malesky, Ben Olken, Berk Ozler, Nancy Qian, Jorg Spenkuch, David Stromberg, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, the EGAP peer response system (in particular, Katherine Casey, Nahomi Ichino and Macartan Humphreys), and participants at APSA 2016, CAF Development Bank of Latin America, Harvard University, the Institute for International Economic Studies (IIES) at Stockholm University, ITAM-Notre Dame 2023 Conference, MIT, NEUDC 2019, Northwestern University, Nova SBE, Ryerson University, UCL, University of Bologna, University of Houston, University of Rochester, University of Toronto, Uppsala University, Warwick University, and WPSA 2017. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the J-PAL Governance Initiative and the International Growth Centre. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Benjamin Marx
I would like to report that I was employed as a Project Associate (2010-2011), and subsequently as a Project Coordinator (2011-2013) by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a non-profit based in New Haven, CT, USA.

Besides this position, I have no relevant financial interests that relate to the research described in this paper.
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Christopher Blattman, Horacio Larreguy, Benjamin Marx, and Otis R. Reid, "Eat Widely, Vote Wisely: Lessons from a Campaign Against Vote Buying in Uganda," NBER Working Paper 26293 (2019), https://doi.org/10.3386/w26293.

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Eat Widely, Vote Wisely: Lessons from a Campaign Against Vote Buying in Uganda

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