"Bought or Coerced? The Electoral Mobilization of Roma Voters in Eastern Europe"

In elections around the world, voters are illegally influenced not only by offers of gifts and favors by the state but also by intimidation. One common form of intimidation involves threatening to cut voters off from benefits on which they rely. In this paper, we examine whether and how politicians use positive and negative individually-targeted inducements in low-income localities in rural Hungary. We argue that under conditions of ballot secrecy, politicians focus personalist inducements on influencing the turnout behavior of supporters who are sure to vote for a specific party once they are in the ballot box. In this setting, coercion serves as a complement to positive inducements, as core supporters receive entitlements to long-term transfers and then are more vulnerable during elections to party agents who threaten to cut off those benefits. We test this theory with an 1,800-household original survey of citizens in low-income rural areas after the 2014 Hungarian election.