Electoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying—a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. This article examines how clientelist parties’ use of vote buying is jointly shaped by two voter traits: poverty and partisanship. We hypothesize that clientelist parties pursue a mixed strategy, broadly targeting their core voters but also poor swing voters. While most of the existing evidence comes from single-country studies, this study adds cross-national evidence from multilevel regressions of survey data from 22 Latin American countries. Empirically, we find that poverty matters mainly for swing voters. For partisans, the effect of poverty on vote buying is weaker. These results suggest that poverty plays an important role in vote-buying strategies—but also that partisanship moderates clientelistic parties’ vote-buying strategies during electoral campaigns.

拉丁美洲选举竞赛的特点往往是政党试图通过收买选票来影响选举结果，这种做法似乎在整个地区的选举中持续存在。本文探讨了两个选民特征（贫困和党派之争）如何共同影响侍从政党对贿选的使用。我们假设庇护主义政党奉行混合策略，广泛针对其核心选民，但也针对贫困的摇摆选民。虽然大多数现有证据来自单一国家研究，但本研究添加了来自 22 个拉丁美洲国家调查数据的多级回归的跨国证据。根据经验，我们发现贫困主要对摇摆选民有影响。对于党派来说，贫困对购买选票的影响较弱。