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Tea Leaf Elections: Inferring Purpose for Authoritarian Elections from Postelection Responses to Defeats

The power of authoritarian elections is not unlimited. When using elections as a source of information, authoritarian regimes may not be able to collect from a single election all the information it could theoretically provide, and so they must commit to seeking only some specific signal(s) in each election. It is possible to identify the type of information each regime seeks from its elections by studying its reactions to small but unexpected defeats. Applying this logic to Vietnam, I find that the regime responded to the defeats of its favored candidates in the 2016 election for the national legislature by increasing central transfers to provinces in which it had suffered these defeats. This evidence suggests that the Vietnamese regime uses elections as an opinion poll to identify areas in which it is less popular, instead of as a test to detect local officials who underperform in their electoral manipulation efforts.