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.