Migration and electoral integrity: the impact of remittances on vote-buying in Morocco

In both democracies and electoral autocracies, vote-buying is a plausible occurrence. Studies have shown that voters’ characteristics, including income, and contextual conditions, such as the plurality of actors and information sources, shape the prevalence of this phenomenon. Yet, little attention has been paid to the role of transnational factors, notably the transmission of financial and social remittances by emigrants to relatives and friends back home, either from abroad or upon return. This article addresses this gap by drawing on an original probability household survey conducted in Morocco’s high-outmigration region of Béni Mellal-Khenifra. To account for the social sensitivity of the topic, we employed a list experiment to elicit less biased estimates of citizen experiences of vote-buying targeting and effectiveness, and analysed their relationship with financial and social remittances, alongside other factors. Our findings indicate that social remittances significantly reduce citizens’ susceptibility to vote-buying, while financial remittances show a similar but weaker pattern, highlighting the role of transnational resources in shaping resistance to electoral clientelism. We also find suggestive evidence that citizens without remittances are more exposed to vote-buying targeting. Indirect questioning also reveals a substantially higher prevalence of vote-buying than direct questioning, confirming the sensitivity of the phenomenon. By linking transnational flows of money and ideas to electoral practices, the study shows how migration helps explain local political dynamics.