During electoral campaigns in new democracies, parties and candidates often employ clientelist strategies such as vote buying to mobilize electoral support. The academic consensus is that when voters are offered gifts or money in exchange for their votes, it has detrimental consequences for...

The wave of upbeat stories on the developing world's emerging middle class has reinvigorated a debate on how social class in general and the middle class in particular ought to be defined and empirically measured. With the aim of adding clarity to this debate, this dissertation provides a...