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Why do some citizens remove the same politicians that they elected from office? This article examines the use of recall referenda, an increasingly prevalent process in which citizens organize a vote to remove politicians from office before they complete their terms. Although celebrated as a tool to improve electoral accountability, we argue that recall referenda are organized to pursue political vendettas. We test this claim using an original data set on the different stages leading to subnational recalls in Peru. Recalls are initiated more often when politicians lose by narrow vote margins and when women hold office. Once put to a vote, citizens do use office performance to decide whether to retain their politicians. Losing politicians organized fewer recall referenda following an institutional reform that allowed politicians to name their successors. The implication is that recall referenda create weak incentives to improve office performance, but careful institutional design can improve their functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizational membership is one of the strongest, yet overlooked, predictors of vote buying across Latin America. We argue that this relationship is driven by the fact that politicians outsource some of their vote-buying efforts to interest associations. In contrast to the existing literature that focuses on party brokers, who are loyal to a single political machine, we introduce the concepts of organizational brokers, who represent interest associations and renegotiate ties to political parties between election cycles, and hybrid brokers, who split their loyalties between an interest association and a single political party. We illustrate the operation of these alternative broker types through case studies of street-vending organizations in an uninstitutionalized party system, Colombia, and peasant organizations in an institutionalized party system, Mexico. Attention to the role of brokers and the organizations that they represent has implications for political accountability, collective action, and the persistence of clientelism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]