Vote buying and local public goods provision: Substitutes or complements?

Abstract We seek to better understand the demand side of vote buying: the conditions under which voters participate in, eschew, tolerate, or punish the exchange of targeted material benefits for votes. We ask whether voters perceive vote buying as substituting for local public goods provision in office, or whether they think that candidates who buy votes will excel at securing local public goods. Voters who place great value on future public goods may opt out of vote buying if they believe they are substitutes and punish vote‐buying candidates at the polls. We explore these issues in a nationwide survey in Nepal. Multiple survey experiments provide evidence that Nepali voters perceive vote buying and local public goods provision as substitutes. Voters who hold this view also express a preference for candidates who do not engage in vote buying, implying they prioritize public goods provision, although this latter result is not causally identified.