Mario Chacon

When is Democracy an Equilibrium? Theory and Evidence from Colombia’s La Violencia

The conventional wisdom is that for a democracy to be consolidated, all groups must have a chance to attain power. If they do not, then they will subvert democracy and choose to fight for power. In this article, the authors show that this wisdom is seriously incomplete because it considers absolute, not relative payoffs. Although the probability of winning an election increases with the size of a group, so does the probability of winning an armed conflict. Thus, in a situation in which all groups have a high chance of winning an election, they may also have a high chance of winning a fight. Indeed, in a natural model, the authors show that democracy may never be consolidated in such a situation. Rather, democracy may only be stable when one group is dominant. The authors explore this key aspect of the theory using data from La Violencia, a political conflict in Colombia during the years 1946—1950 between the Liberal and Conservative parties. Consistent with their results, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors show that fighting between the parties was more intense in municipalities where the support of the parties was more evenly balanced.

In the Line of Fire: Political Violence and Decentralization in Colombia

Policies aimed at increasing the resources and administrative responsibilities of subnational governments are often proposed as a conict resolution strategy. This paper explores a particular threat to the effectiveness of decentralizing reforms in war-torn countries, namely the capture of local governments by non-state armed actors. These groups are reliant on rents and may increase their violence against local authorities in an attempt to capture local governments in a decentralized system. This relationship between decentralization and conict is explored using subnational-level data from Colombia during the 1990s, when local scal capacity greatly expanded. I exploit a key reform to identify the effect of automatic transfers from the center on conict casualties. The evidence shows that scal transfers are associated with higher murder rates of local authorities and politicians. Moreover, this effect is conditional on the state capacity of localities. These results are robust and consistent with the rent-seeking strategy of paramilitaries and guerrillas during the period.

Ballots and Bullets: The Electoral Origin of the Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

We explore how democratic elections in Nepal influenced the onset of the Nepalese Civil War (1996-2006). Specifically, we use an original dataset to systematically examine local-level electoral outcomes and their relationship with the onset of violence against government officials during the initial stages of the conflict. Our empirical strategy uses a regression discontinuity design taking villages with close margins of victory and defeat for the incumbent party (Nepali Congress), and identifies the effect of the partys control in the local-level elections preceding the onset of hostilities by Maoist insurgents. Our findings suggest a positive and significant effect of a Nepali Congress victory on the likelihood of Maoist attacks and on patterns of recruitment during the early stages of the conflict. Our analysis contributes to the comparative politics literature exploring the link between democracy and conflict and to the formal literature on democratization and revolutions.