The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [74]
Still, a couple of variables can help us determine the quality of democratic governance around the world. The first is the quantity of resources—Kuwaiti oil, Congolese diamonds—at the disposal of rulers to purchase the acquiescence of the ruled. The other is the going price of voters, the value they give to their vote. This provides a precise measure of the legitimacy of the political system. The most corrupt countries are those in which voters are cheapest.
The price of a vote is typically a function of a voter’s income. Poorer ones demand less because they deem their vote to be worth little compared with direly needed cash. In the 1996 Thai general elections, voters were offered an average of 678 baht apiece, but those in Bangkok were likely to receive twice as much as those in rural areas, who were poorer. In São Tomé and Príncipe, a poor former Portuguese colony on two tiny islands off the coast of West Africa, a survey of voters in the 2006 election found that the median price for a vote in the election to the national assembly was $7.10, but the average reached about $37 in the capital district.
Price is also determined by what is at stake in the election. In São Tomé and Príncipe, vote buying took off only after oil reserves were discovered offshore in the late 1990s in the Gulf of Guinea—offering the prospect of a windfall. Not all races were worth the same. A vote for a president, whose power is mostly limited to the domains of defense and foreign affairs, cost merely $4.20. The real money was in the election to the national assembly—which wields most executive and legislative power.
While the direct purchase of votes might seem a perversion of democracy, it has a long-standing tradition with substantial pedigree. In Britain, elections were bought at least as far back as the seventeenth century. The practice grew as moneyed members from Britain’s colonies and its new commercial class tried to break into the landed gentry’s monopoly of political power. In 1812, George Venables-Vernon, the second Baron Vernon, left his son-in-law, Edward Harbord, third Baron Suffield, “one sum not exceeding £5,000 towards the purchase of a seat in Parliament.” Such commerce prevailed until the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act of 1883 imposed harsh penalties on those who gave or received bribes and established tight limits to campaign spending.
Across the Atlantic, newspapers in nineteenth-century New York would quote the price of votes just like that of hogs. The Elizabeth-town Post quoted a vote in Ulster County, at twenty-five dollars. Voters played the system so well they would wait to be paid before voting for the candidate they preferred anyway. On November 13, 1879, the Watkins Express in Schuyler County printed a harangue by Congregationalist minister Thomas K. Beecher extolling the virtue of political free markets: “When a good man for a good purpose buys the vote of a fellow man, the voter—being a principal and a sovereign—is free to do as he chooses; the act is right. The buyer is no briber in the court of conscience, not at the bar of God, except he have an intent to pervert the judgment. And the humble-minded voter who accepts the gift and guidance of the good man aforesaid is obeying motives manlier and more nearly safe than those which ordinarily sway our more active and enthusiastic voters.”
Direct vote buying died in the United States when the introduction of the secret ballot made it impossible for politicians to check whether voters were delivering their vote as promised. Still, the practice of purchasing political power has stayed with us forever. Buying votes was first replaced by the equally dubious tactic of paying voters who supported the opposing