Pressure,Favours, and Vote-buying: Experimental Evidence from Romania and Bulgaria

This article examines the mix of non-programmatic strategies used by politicians to gain voter support in contemporary Eastern Europe. We use a mixed-method design that combines survey-based experiments and qualitative research in a paired comparison of localities in Romania and Bulgaria. Our article documents that the mix of clientelistic strategies differs across localities with different turnover rates. In both Romania and Bulgaria, we find that the use of clientelistic strategies that politicise state resources is higher in localities with long-term political incumbents.