Juan Luis Jiménez, economist: "Vote buying is produced by the patronage networks of bad mayors"

In his thread, Jiménez, based on the doctoral thesis “Political corruption in Spain: a descriptive analysis (2000-2020)”, by José Abreu (doctoral student at the same ULPGC), which is being supervised by Jiménez himself and by Joaquín Artés, from the Complutense University, explained how between 2000 and 2020 72 procedures (with those investigated) related to electoral fraud in Spain were revealed . By parties, PP (49%) and PSOE (22%) accounted for almost 75% of the cases. 42 of these cases were related to the manipulation of the electoral census (generally fraudulent registrations). And 30 related to the purchase of votes or the manipulation of the vote by mail, which is exactly what has happened in the most notorious cases of the recently concluded 28M campaign.

Jiménez also revealed that, of all the cases opened between 2000 and 2020 for the aforementioned reasons, 18 remained open until December 2020; 24 were archived, 13 with an acquittal and 17 ended in conviction. The professor answered elDiario.es by phone this same Saturday first thing in the morning.

Based on the data that you published on Twitter, based on Mr. Abreu’s thesis, attempts to buy votes are not a new practice or something that only happened in this campaign.

The data is from José Abreu’s doctoral thesis. He had planned to do his doctoral thesis in the established time, which is four years, but he had to ask for extensions because the first step of his thesis was to create a database with all the cases of corruption that have occurred in Spain between 2000 and 2020. And we never thought that it would have the volume of cases that the database has.

Why are most of these cases not usually disclosed?

Of course, we knew what the press puts out on a daily basis. But he went to the newspaper libraries and began looking for words like ‘corruption’, ‘corrupt’, ‘investigated’, etc. And from there he learned that in that period between 2000 and 2020 in Spain there were more than 3,700 cases of corruption that came with people investigated. In other words, there were many more cases of corruption that remained in gossip or hoaxes, but we did not investigate those. That’s where the thread came from. I asked Abreu if there had been cases similar to those of the last week [vinculados con la compra de votos].

They found 72 between 2000 and 2020.

Yes, that they came to arrest a person investigated 72. Of them, one was at the provincial level and the others were all at the local level. Among the latter, there was normally only a single party involved except for one case in which there were two.

Most of the time they affect PP and PSOE.

Being the two parties that have the most representation… Well, although it doesn’t have to be the largest party that has the most cases of corruption.

Why do you think that these cases of vote buying mainly occur in small or very small municipalities?

We have read a lot about corruption and one of the arguments used in most international studies is the creation of patronage networks, which everyone understands what they are. Basically, the local government is used to generate a series of networks that support you in voting and sustain you for the years that you will be in the Mayor’s Office. With this we did not discover gunpowder. It is a behavior of the incentives that each of the bad municipal councilors have to stay in power.

Could this that has happened in Melilla or Mojácar condition the elections?

I have no information for it. We do not have any data that has led to say that the political color has changed because of vote buying. It would be a very interesting job.

Do you think there are enough elements to invalidate the results where these cases have occurred? Could someone go to court and challenge the results?

Don’t know. I have no legal knowledge for it.

Should measures of some kind be taken by the administrations to avoid more cases in the future? What steps could be taken?

Should it? Yes. Could it be? Don’t know. We are economists, we are not political scientists. Our knowledge is about the effects of anything on something. In this case, the incentives are clear and what should be done is to try to change so that the incentives are not what they currently are. How can a mayor or mayoress not have incentives to buy votes? Don’t know.

79% of cases of vote buying occur in municipalities with a population of less than 10,000 inhabitants. Can patronage networks have an easier time spreading to smaller sites?

If right. And, in fact, we have a research article talking about propagation in which we evaluated a few years ago that local political corruption spreads in Spain. If a case occurs in one place, it is easier for a case of local political corruption to also occur in the neighboring municipality.

Do people legitimize those practices if they happen next door?

Clear. The problem is that when someone does something wrong and nobody does anything to punish him, that action is legitimized. And well: ‘we’ve done it all our lives’. And it continues forward. It is much easier to create these networks when you know everyone than in a large municipality like Madrid or Barcelona.