The Core Voter’s Curse: Clientelistic Threats and Promises in Hungarian Elections

Abstract

In elections around the world, voters are influenced not only by positive offers of gifts and favors but also by the threat of negative sanctions for their individual electoral choices. Preelectoral entitlements such as jobs, assets, and welfare create expectations of future access that brokers can use as powerful negative inducements at the moment of the vote. We argue that in conditions where ballot secrecy makes it difficult to monitor vote choices, brokers are likely to target core supporters with both preelectoral entitlements and election-time threats. We refer to this counterintuitive logic as the “core voters’ curse.” We find evidence for this argument using an original household survey of 1,860 Hungarian citizens in 93 rural communities fielded shortly after the 2014 parliamentary election.