Paying for votes is common in the Philippines and Thailand. The Thai Prime Minister, on the eve of the East Asian crisis, was the rural politician Banharn Silpa-archa. His nickname was Mr. Mobile ATM because of all the bribes he handed out.
Politicians are corrupt partly because developing country politics is ‘retail politics’: helping people with small loans, mediating disputes and getting children into better schools or universities.
A vicious circle develops. Politicians take bribes to build a war chest to bribe their voters to re-elect them. More honest politicians do not win office unless they stoop to paying cash for votes.
Japan is similar. LDP politicians have personal support networks that are 50,000 or more strong which are based on giving and receiving personal favours over their entire term of office.
Robert Tollison wrote a paper on the price of votes and the history of open vote trading in Great Britain and the United States prior to the 20th century.
Tollison found that the winners from the introduction of secret ballots were the middle class because the working class could no longer sell their votes to the rich.
Because the poor tend to face extremely high costs of organization, it may have been technically possible, although economically inefficient, to organize as a bloc of voters in order to secure net wealth transfers to themselves as a group.
From the standpoint of the individual poor voter, a more attractive alternative than tilting at the windmills of redistribution would have been to sell his vote to the highest bidder…
After the passage of the secret ballot in 1872 in Great Britain, the percentage of Commons seats held by landed interests dropped like a rock.
The Thai and Filipino middle classes hate the way the votes of the rural poor can be bought with bribes (and public services paid by taxing the middle class in the cities).
The Japanese, Thai and Philippine parliaments all have multi-member constituencies where the 3, 4 or 12 candidates with the most votes are elected.
This election system forces candidates from the same party to run against each other and build personal support networks to win elections off their own mantle.
This splitting of voter support works well for incumbents who have personal name recognition and a war chest based on bribes extorted during their previous term to fund cash for votes to win re-election.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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