Determinants of Fraud in the 1922 Colombian Presidential Election

He Who Counts Elects: Determinants of Fraud in the 1922 Colombian Presidential Electiony Isaías Chavesz Leopoldo Fergussonx James A. Robinson{ December 14, 2008 Abstract This paper constructs measures of the extent of ballot stu¢ ng (fraudulent votes) and electoral coercion at the municipal level using data from Colombia’s 1922 Pres- idential elections. Our main …ndings are that the presence of the state reduced the extent of fraud, but that of the clergy, which was closely imbricated in partisan politics, increased it. We also show that landed elites to some extent substituted for the absence of the state and managed to reduce the extent of fraud where they were strong. At the same time, in places which were completely out of the sphere of the state, and thus partisan politics, both ballot stu¢ ng and coercion were relatively low. Thus the relationship between state presence and fraud is not monotonic. Colombian political aphorism: In Spanish “el que escruta elige”(Bushnell, 1993, p. 125). yWe are particularly grateful to Eduardo Posada-Carbó for telling us about the data on the 1922 election in the National Archive in Bogotá. We also thank Daron Acemoglu, Maria Angélica Bautista, Camilo García, Maria Alejandra Palacio, Olga L. Romero and Daniel Ziblatt for their comments and help with the data. All translations from Spanish texts are our own. zHarvard University, IQSS, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA02138. E-mail: [email protected] xMassachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 50 memorial Drive, Cambridge MA, E-mail: [email protected]. {Harvard University, Department of Government and IQSS, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA02138. E-mail: [email protected] 1 “Lo que han ganado las armas no se puede perder con papelitos” Colombian Political Proverb1 1 Introduction The preponderance of the literature on democracy in political science has focused on the origins and timing of the introduction of universal su¤rage (e.g., Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens, 1992, Collier, 1999, Acemoglu and Robinson, 2006). While this approach is surely justi…ed in many cases, it also leaves aside many puzzles. For instance, Argentina had universal male su¤rage after the promulgation of the 1853 constitution, as did Mexico after its 1857 constitution, but neither country is typically coded as a democracy in the 19th century. In fact, the typical date for the introduction of democracy in Argentina is the passing of the Saenz Peña Law in 1914. This law did not change su¤rage however, its main aim was to eliminate electoral corruption and fraud, things which had previously negated the e¤ects of universal male su¤rage. This example, and others such as the introduction of the secret ballot in Chile in 1957 (Baland and Robinson, 2008), suggest that the consequences of variation in electoral fraud are possibly as large as that of the variation of the formal institutions of democracy. Despite the importance of electoral fraud and corruption it has been little studied, possibly because it is so di¢ cult to measure and quantify. In consequence we have little idea about what causes variation in the extent or incidence of such fraud. Moreover, there are many ways to undermine the true outcome of elections ranging from vote buying through disenfranchising potential voters, to using coercion to keep voters away, coercion to force voters to vote in particular ways, or creating fraudulent ballots (‘ballot stu¢ ng’) in favor of one candidate. This lack of systematic evidence makes it di¢ cult to understand the determinants and implications of fraud. In this paper we use two unique data sources from the 1922 Colombian presidential election to examine electoral fraud. First, we are able to construct a (necessarily imperfect) measure of the extent of fraudulent voting or ‘ballot stu¢ ng’at the municipal election. We do this by combining data collected on the vote totals reported by mayors to the central government with estimates of the maximum potential franchise from the 1918 population census. This gives us at least a lower bound on the extent of ballot stu¢ ng. For 483 out of 1 “What you’ve won with arms cannot be taken away by a few slips of paper.” 2 the total 713 municipalities of Colombia for which we have data we …nd the reported vote totals to be larger than the maximum number of people who could possibly have voted. In such municipalities there was obvious ballot stu¢ ng and this was consequential. Indeed, according to this methodology the total number of stu¤ed ballots was 222,202 which was larger than the winning margin of 193,228 by which the Conservative candidate Pedro Nel Ospina defeated the Liberal loser Benjamín Herrera. Table 1 shows some of the basic data from this exercise by Colombian department. One can see here that there is a lot of variation. For instance in Antioquia, traditionally a bastion of the Conservative party, the total number of votes cast was 76,420 of which we calculate 11,648 were fraudulent. On the other hand, in the Liberal stronghold of Santander of the 55,492 votes ‘cast’almost 24,000 were fake, a far greater proportion. Second, we use various sources of information, particularly the proceedings of a conference held in the Colombian city of Ibagué after the election, to code a variable on incidents of electoral violence (Blanco, Solano and Rodríguez, 1922). This conference, held by the Liberal party in the wake of an election in which they were defrauded of the presidency, contained numerous accounts of both ballot stu¢ ng, fraud and coercion. We then study some of the potential sources of variation in ballot stu¢ ng and coercion across municipalities. Though we are not able to make strong claims about causality, we do uncover some very robust conditional correlations. First, for the whole of Colombia, we …nd that the presence of the state is negatively correlated with the extent of ballot stu¢ ng. In municipalities where there was a greater presence of the army or more government bureaucrats, ballot stu¢ ng was less. In addition, the presence of Catholic priests is also negatively correlated with ballot stu¢ ng. With respect to coercion, we …nd that the presence of priests is positively correlated with coercion. Second, focusing on the department of Cundinamarca for which we have much richer data, in addition to the above results, we …nd that ballot stu¢ ng is negatively correlated with land inequality and the extent to which local politics is monopolized by individuals (which we refer to as ‘political concentration’), but positively correlated with the extent to which large landowners and the political class were fused (a variable we call ‘overlap’). We also …nd that political concentration is signi…cantly negatively correlated with electoral coercion. We believe that there is a great deal of consistency between these …ndings and o¤er the following simple interpretations. First, they suggest that the Colombian state in 1922 was not partisan, but in fact rather ‘Weberian’and attempted to control electoral fraud when it 3 could. Unfortunately, however, its reach was limited. Second, priests played an important role in coercion of Liberal voters and this coercion was aimed primarily in stopping them voting. When Liberals were disenfranchised, the measured extent of ballot stu¢ ng in our data will be lower and this is why the number of priests in a municipality is positively correlated with the presence of coercion but negatively correlated with the extent of ballot stu¢ ng. This result is consistent with the conjecture of Posada-Carbó (1995, pp. 16-17) that outright violence was complementary to ballot stu¢ ng. Third, fraud was disliked not just by state o¢ cials, but also by traditional landed elites. Landed elites opposed the chaos and disorder that historical sources suggest accompanied and facilitated ballot stu¢ ng and stopped it when they could. This is why within Cundinamarca we …nd less ballot stu¢ ng where land inequality is high since these are precisely the core areas of the department with a strong consolidated elite. Fourth, not all landed elites were traditional. Some had entered this class through the use of political power and thus secured their property rights via politics. In these places, where overlap was high, ballot stu¢ ng was used as a method of sustaining the political in‡uence of such elites. Finally, areas where political concentration was high featured less ballot stu¢ ng and coercion because such concentration was a feature of areas with caudillos who were to a large extent outside the control and circuit of Conservative politicians. In these ‘independent republics’there was no major contribution to the incumbent (Conservative) cause one way or another. Though these …ndings about the political role of the Catholic Church may be surprising to some, they are in line with a rich historical literature on Colombia which has emphasized the connections between the Church and the Conservative party. For instance Deas observes “the church was the electoral arm of the Conservatives. Liberalism was a sin: Colombian sermons were intense and obstinate on this point” (Deas, 1993, p. 219). While Posada- Carbó has also noted the role of clergy in perpetrating fraud: in 1933, in Cocuy, Boyacá, “a group of 400 conservatives from a neighboring municipality, lead by priest Nepomuceno Goyeneche, invaded Cocuy with the intention of grabbing the ballot boxes”(Posada-Carbó, 1995, p. 10). Our results in Colombia contrast with and complement the small existing literature on electoral fraud. Most related is the research of Lehoucq and Molina (2002) who studied of electoral corruption in Costa Rica. These authors study over a thousand legal accusations of ballot rigging between 1901 and 1946, examining their intensity and spatial distribution.

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