The Effect of Vote Buying on Voters’ Behaviour: A Study On 2014 Legislative Member Election Kendari City and Regional Head Election in South Konawe

To date, several studies have investigated money politics. For example, it was revealed in Thailand’s 1996 general election that one in three households received an average of $ 27 (Dekel & Wolisnkiy, 2008). Gonzalez et.al (2012) reported that 24% of registered voters admitted receiving souvenirs in Nicaragua’s 2008 general election. A candidate in Taiwan had to spend up to $ 3 million (Grossman and Helpman, E, 1996). In Indonesia, money politics has attracted many researchers’ attention, with different focus. Slater (2004) and Ambardi (2009) discusses the theme of party’s cartelization, with an emphasis on the distribution of material resources. Ambardi, as with Mietzner (2007), also focused on the issue of fundraising organized by political party. Other studies concerning money politics were carried out by Tomsa (2008), Robison and Hadiz (2004; 2013), Winters (2011; 2013), Aspinall and Sukmajaati (2015). The current study was conducted on the arena of regional elections and the election of legislative members. The research method employed was the quantitative techniques. The population was 470.737, of which 300 was taken as sample. Data were analyzed by using the quantitative analysis. Results showed a significant relationship between vote buying and voters’ behavior. Based on the results of multiple regression analysis, the value of Fcount is 77.314, which is higher than the Ftable of 2.65, with a significance level of 0.000. Compared to the significance level of alpha = 0.05, the probability value is lower than alpha = 0.05. Thereby, the hypothesis proposed in this study was accepted. The implications of this research is that it is necessary to conduct a research on how successful the candidate was in granting rewards to his supporters. Another worth pursuing theme is electoral mobilization strategies adopted by candidates to wider political phenomena, such as policy making, economic redistribution, and the quality of governance.