Vote markets fail on scale, verification, and trust unless a mafia intermediates

Evidence

If votes are a commodity, elections become a transaction in which voters are sellers and politicians buyers. But this market is a cumbersome one in which the buyer is confronted, first, with a question of scale; that s, in any sizable constituency no candidate can realistically negotiate with each individual voter. Next there is the problem of verification (how can the candidate be sure that voter X voted for him?) and hence of trust (that is, should X be paid for his vote before or after the election?). Finally there is the issue of payment: what is the most efficient way to pay all the people who sell their votes? The sellers, too, have their difficulties, for how can they be sure that a candidate will pay up once they have voted for him? A more ideal setting for the mafia can scarcely be imagined. — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 471

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels Milgrom et al.’s private-judge analysis: the mafia supplies the third-party verification and enforcement that a decentralized reputation market (here, vote-selling) cannot. Also resonates with Gambetta’s own core thesis of the mafia as protection provider. — connects to: Prepayment for vote blocks could fail when brokers did not deliver
• SEED: Angles for an essay on how third-party enforcement emerges wherever anonymous markets face verification costs — votes, diamonds, trade fairs — using Gambetta’s passage as the bridge.
• ADDENDUM: Complements the graft-and-growth piece’s account of mafia-as-infrastructure: here the mafia functions as the transaction-enabling infrastructure for corrupt electoral markets.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia The Business of…, 471