Prague Economic Papers 2016, 25(5):591-606 | DOI: 10.18267/j.pep.576

Vote Buying and Victory of Election: The Case of Taiwan

Chyi-Lu Jang1, Chun-Ping Chang2
1 Department of Political Economy, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC (cjang@mail.nsysu.edu.tw).
2 Department of Marketing Management, Shih Chien University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC, and Visiting Research Fellow, School of Economics and Finance, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Shaanxi, China.

This paper examines the effect of vote buying on the vote shares of multiple parties using maximum likelihood estimation of a Dirichlet distribution in a panel of 23 counties of Taiwan over the period of 1998-2008. We find that vote buying significantly influences the vote shares of multiple parties in Taiwan parliamentary elections. In particular, we find that vote buying reduces the likelihood of Chinese National Party (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) votes by 10% and 11%, respectively. Our results provide strong evidence that vote buying decreases the probability of electoral success. We conclude that vote buying does not ensure victory in Taiwan parliamentary elections, and, therefore, emphasize that vote buying is ineffective and counterproductive practice. We offer several possible explanations for why candidates use scarce resources for this illegal practice during election campaigns. These results are robust to group logit model with seemingly unrelated regressions.

Keywords: Taiwan, Dirichlet distribution, vote shares, vote buying
JEL classification: D72, O53, P16

Published: January 1, 2016  Show citation

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Jang, C., & Chang, C. (2016). Vote Buying and Victory of Election: The Case of Taiwan. Prague Economic Papers, 25(5), 591-606. doi: 10.18267/j.pep.576
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