Who Undermines the Peace at the Ballot Box? The Case of Colombia

ABSTRACT

Electoral politics and violent civil conflict often coexist. Citizens exposed and unexposed to violence bear the costs of conflict unevenly and, thus, conceive of militant vs. accommodationist state response to the perpetrators of violence differently. The literature has found that victims of political violence tend to endorse militant state response against nonstate actors seen as responsible. This result is mostly based on secessionist conflicts in which victims of violence are often shielded from the costs of state counterinsurgency or counterterrorism campaigns. By contrast, we argue, in non-secessionist conflicts, individuals exposed to violence tend to also experience the state militant anti-guerrilla operations, which often lead to state abuses of civilians. We expect that civilians exposed to nonstate and state attacks will be more likely to support pro-peace policies. We find support for this argument analyzing Colombia’s 2014 presidential election and 2016 peace agreement referendum. In addition, we use original data on local candidates’ pro- and anti-peace process positions in Colombia’s 2014 congressional election to test the underlying logic of the argument that local communities exposed to both nonstate and state violence are more likely to demand pro-peace policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• counterterrorism
• counterinsurgency
• violence and voting behavior
• insurgent attacks
• violence and public opinion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. Claude Berrebi and Esteban F. Klor, “On Terrorism and Electoral Outcomes: Theory and Evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 6 (2006): 899–925; Arzu Kibris, “Funerals and Elections: The Effects of Terrorism on Voting Behavior in Turkey,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55, no. 2 (2011): 220–47; Anna Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff, “Terrorism and Voting: The Effect of Rocket Threat on Voting in Israeli Elections,” American Political Science Review 108, no. 3 (2014): 588–604; Claude Berrebi and Esteban Klor, “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate,” American Political Science Review 102, no. 3 (2008): 279–301; Luis de la Calle and Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, “Killing and Voting in the Basque Country: An Exploration of the Electoral Link Between ETA and its Political Branch,” Terrorism and Political Violence 25 (2013): 94–112.

2. Berrebi and Klor, ‘On Terrorism and ElectoralOutcomes: Theory and Evidence from the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,’ Kibris, ‘Funerals and Elections: The Effects of Terrorism on Voting Behavior in Turkey,’ Berrebi and Klor, ‘Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism? Direct Evidence from the Israeli Electorate,’ de la Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca, ‘Killing and Voting in the Basque Country: An Exploration of the Electoral Link Between ETA and its Political Branch.’

3. Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai, “Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 4 (2013): 679–705; Anna O. Pechenkina, Andrew W. Bausch, and Kiron K. Skinner, “How Do Civilians Attribute Blame for State Indiscriminate Violence?” Journal of Peace Research Forthcoming (2019).

4. The coexistence of violence and electoral politics is often identified as the central obstacle to “meaningful democratization” Paul Staniland, “Violence and Democracy,” Comparative Politics 47, no. 1 (2014): 100.

5. Human Rights Watch, “Ukraine: Widespread Use of Cluster Munitions. Government Responsible for Cluster Attacks on Donetsk,” Report from October 20, 2014.

6. “Observatorio de Memoria y Conflicto,” http://centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/observatorio/ (accessed August 30, 2019).

7. Felicity De Zulueta, “Terror Breeds Terrorists,” Medicine, Conflict and Survival 22, no. 1 (2006): 14.

8. Maria Alejandra Silva, “Alvaro Uribe: The Most Dangerous Man in Colombian Politics,” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, October 20, 2017.

9. “Reign of Terror,” Encyclopædia Britannica, 2019.

10. Berrebi and Klor, “On Terrorism and Electoral Outcomes”; Berrebi and Klor, “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism?”; Eric D. Gould and Esteban F. Klor, “Does Terrorism Work?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125, no. 4 (2010): 1459–510.

11. We note that Gould and Klor’s (2010) finding is more nuanced, as they argue that the long-term effect of political violence against civilians is the overall shift of the Israeli political spectrum to the left, we discuss this finding in detail further in this section (Gould and Klor, “Does Terrorism Work?”).

12. Kibris, “Funerals and Elections.”

13. While the data from Perú and Spain do not investigate voter preferences for militant vs. accommodationist response toward the perpetrators of violence, they reveal that the provinces that experienced civilian casualties from insurgent attacks punished the political parties associated with them (Jóhanna Kristín Birnir and Anita Gohdes, “Voting in the Shadow of Violence: Electoral Politics and Conflict in Peru,” Journal of Global Security Studies 3, no. 1 (2018): 181–97; de la Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca, “Killing and Voting in the Basque Country: An Exploration of the Electoral Link Between ETA and its Political Branch”).

14. Getmansky and Zeitzoff, “Terrorism and Voting.”

15. Andrew Shaver and Jacob N. Shapiro, “The Effect of Civilian Casualties on Wartime Informing: Evidence from the Iraq War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution (forthcoming); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

16. Daphna Canetti-Nisim, Eran Halperin, Keren Sharvit, and Stevan E. Hobfoll, “A New Stress-Based Model of Political Extremism Personal Exposure to Terrorism, Psychological Distress, and Exclusionist Political Attitudes,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, no. 3 (2009): 363–89.

17. Arturas Rozenas, Sebastian Schutte, and Yuri Zhukov, “The Political Legacy of Violence: The Long-Term Impact of Stalin’s Repression in Ukraine,” Journal of Politics 79, no. 4 (2017): 1147–61; Noam Lupu and Leonid Peisakhin, “The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations,” American Journal of Political Science 61, no. 4 (2017): 836–51; Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” American Economic Review 101, no. December (2011): 3221–252.

18. Graeme Blair,  C. Christine Fair,  Neil Malhotra,  and Jacob N. Shapiro, “Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan,” American Journal of Political Science 57, no. 1 (2013): 30–48.

19. Pechenkina, Bausch, and Skinner, “How Do Civilians Attribute Blame for State Indiscriminate Violence?”

20. Gould and Klor, “Does Terrorism Work?”

21. Additionally, in 2004, Spain experienced a large-scale terrorist attack by Al Qaeda three days before the election. The attack mobilized turnout within the population that disapproved of the incumbent’s foreign policy (José G. Montalvo, “Voting after the Bombings: A Natural Experiment on the Effect Of Terrorist Attacks on Democratic Elections,” Review of Economics and Statistics 93, no. 4 (2011): 1146–54; Valentina Bali, “Terror and Elections: Lessons from Spain,” Electoral Studies 26, no. 3 (2007): 669–87). While this case differs from the rest of the literature as it focuses on foreign policy, it emphasizes that exposure to violence does not always create preferences for a more militant response. Sometimes, civilians are more likely to blame the incumbent for failed policies that are perceived as being responsible for the violence.

22. Alternatively, Nicolás Liendo and Jessica Maves Braithwaite, “Determinants of Colombian Attitudes toward the Peace Process,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 35, no. 6 (2018): 622–36, find that self-reported experience of violence is unrelated to voter preferences and Michael Weintraub, Juan F. Vargas, and Thomas E. Flores, “Vote Choice and Legacies of Violence: Evidence from the 2014 Colombian Presidential Elections,” Research and Politics 2, no. 2 (April–June 2015): 1–8 find a curvilinear effect. Due to space constraints, we discuss these studies in detail in the online appendix.

23. Gould and Klor, “Does Terrorism Work?”

24. The peace process was uneven. Although the proclaimed ceasefire with the FARC did not officially end until 1990, wrapped up in the war against drug cartels and other armed groups, the government led attacks since, at least, 1985.

25. Brandice Canes-Wrone, William G. Howell, and David E. Lewis, “Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis,” Journal of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008): 1–16.

26. Barry Ames, Andy Baker, and Lucio R. Renno, “Split-Ticket Voting as the Rule: Voters and Permanent Divided Government in Brazil,” Electoral Studies 28, no. 1 (2009): 8–20.

27. Juan Albarracín, Laura Gamboa, and Scott Mainwaring, “De-Institutionalization Without Collapse: Colombia Party System,” in Latin America Party Systems: Institutionalization, Decay and Collapse, edited by Scott Mainwaring (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

28. Herbert Kitschelt, Kirk A. Hawkins, Juan Pablo Luna, Guillermo Rosas, Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Latin American Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

29. Marco Palacios and Frank Safford, Historia de Colombia: país fragmentado, sociedad dividida, 10th Reimpression (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2011), 494.

30. Laura Wills Otero, “Colombia: Analyzing the Strategies for Political Action of Alvaro Uribe’s Government, 2002– 10,” in The Resilience of the Latin American Right, edited by Juan Pablo Luna and Cristbal Rovira Kaltwasser (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); Laura Gamboa, “El reajuste de la derecha colombiana. El éxito electoral del uribismo,” Colombia Internacional 99 (2019): 187–214.

31. Until 1986, the president selected mayors and governors. Since 1986 they are popularly elected.

32. Mauricio Romero, Paramilitares y autodefensas, 1982–2003, Grandes temas 13 (Bogotá: Temas de Hoy: Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales, Universidad Nacional de Colombia: Editorial Planeta Colombiana, 2003); Sarah Zukerman Daly, Organized Violence after Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

33. Paramilitary groups alone, account for 44 percent of the fatal victims of the armed conflict in Colombia (“Observatorio de Memoria y Conflicto”).

34. Ana Arjona, Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War, in Collab. with Ebook Library (Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 89–91.

35. Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, “!’Basta ya! Colombia: memorias de guerra y dignidad,” !’Basta ya! Colombia: memorias de guerra y dignidad, 2016, http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/micrositios/informeGeneral/descargas.html (accessed February 8, 2016).

36. Camilo Echandía Castilla and Eduardo Bechara Gómez, “Conducta de la guerrilla durante el gobierno Uribe Vélez: De las lógicas de control territorial a las lógicas de control estratégico,” Análisis Político 19, no. 57 (August 2006): 31–54.

37. Arjona, Rebelocracy.

38. Soledad Granada, Jorge Restrepo, and Andrés Vargas, “El agotamiento de la política de seguridad: evolución y transformaciones recientes en el conflicto armado colombiano,” in Guerras y violencias en Colombia: Herramientas e interpretaciones, edited by Jorge Restrepo and David Aponte (Bogotá, Colombia: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2009).

39. Laura Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins: Strategies against the Erosion of Democracy in Colombia and Venezuela,” Comparative Politics 49, no. 4 (2017): 457–77.

40. Arjona, Rebelocracy, 92.

41. Acuerdo final para la terminación del conflicto y la construcción de una paz verdadera. August 24, 2016.

42. Four years after he left the presidency, Uribe’s approval rating was, on average, 62 percent Gallup, Encuesta Gallup Colombia (2014).

43. Juan Albarracín, “Ideological Self-Placement and Issue Attitudes in Colombian Public Opinion” (paper presented at the 2013 Congress of the Latin American Political Science Association, Bogotá, Colombia, September 25–27, 2013); Wills Otero, “Colombia.”

44. Albarracín, Gamboa, and Mainwaring, “De-Institutionalization Without Collapse.”

45. Uribe remains the head of the party, with party members openly vowing to uphold his wishes.

46. Annette Idler, “Colombia just Voted no on its Plebiscite for Peace. Here’s Why and What it Means,” Washington Post, October 3, 2016.

47. Laia Balcells and Gerard Torrats-Espinosa, “Using a Natural Experiment to Estimate the Electoral Consequences of Terrorist Attacks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 115, no. 42 (2018): 10624–29.

48. We used roll call voting for the conference report of two pre-2014 pieces of legislation: (a) Victims and Land Restitution Law (Ley de Víctimas y Restitución de Tierras–Ley 1448 de 2011) and (b) the Peace Legal Framework (Marco Jurídico para la Paz–Acto Legislativo 1 de 2012).

49. The Colombian government employs the term “terrorism” to delegitimize the insurgency (Silva, “Alvaro Uribe: The Most Dangerous Man in Colombian Politics”). To avoid taking a pro-government position, we use a more neutral term “FARC attacks.”

50. These control variables come from Weintraub, Vargas, and Flores, “Vote Choice and Legacies of Violence: Evidence from the 2014 Colombian Presidential Elections.”

51. Stefano M. Iacus, Gary King, and Giuseppe Porro, “Causal Inference Without Balance Checking: Coarsened Exact Matching,” Political Analysis 20 (2012): 1–24; Gary King and Richard Nielsen, “Why Propensity Scores Should Not Be Used for Matching,” Political Analysis (n.d.): 1–20. doi:10.1017/pan.2019.11, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/whypropensity-scoresshould-not-be-usedformatching/94DDE7ED8E2A796B693096EB714BE68B.

52. Jacob M Montgomery, Brendan Nyhan, and Michelle Torres, “How Conditioning on Posttreatment Variables can Ruin Your Experiment and What to Do About It,” American Journal of Political Science 62, no. 3 (2018): 760–75.

53. We use the 2005 measures of population and rural index, so that insurgency could not affect them. We exclude these criteria from matching on long-term violence.

54. Covariates included for matching are those that could not be shaped by the FARC: population in 2005, area, history of land conflict, and how rural a municipality was in 2005 (see Table 1).

55. In municipalities with only COIN operations, the predicted vote share is 40–50 percent and in the municipalities with only FARC attacks, it is 43–49 percent (not shown in Figure 1). These two estimates are not statistically distinct from each other but they are distinct from the municipalities with no violence and with both types of violence.

56. In localities with only COIN operations, the predicted vote share is 43–53 percent and in the municipalities with only FARC attacks, it is 44–50 percent (not shown in Figure 1). These estimates are not statistically distinct from each other but they are distinct from the municipalities with no violence and with both types of violence.

57. In municipalities with only COIN operations, the predicted anti-peace vote share is 38–47 percent, while in the municipalities with only FARC attacks it is at 42–47 percent. In municipalities with only COIN operations, the predicted pro-peace vote is at 49–59 percent, while in the municipalities with only FARC attacks it is at 49–55 percent (not shown in Figure 1). These pairs of estimates are not statistically distinct from each other but they are distinct from the municipalities with no violence and with both types of violence.

58. Kitschelt et al., Latin American Party Systems.

59. Berrebi and Klor, “On Terrorism and Electoral Outcomes”; Kibris, “Funerals and Elections”; de la Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca, “Killing and Voting in the Basque Country.”

60. Blair et al., “Poverty and Support for Militant Politics”; Pechenkina, Bausch, and Skinner, “How Do Civilians Attribute Blame for State Indiscriminate Violence?”.

61. For instance, see John R. Petrocik, William L. Benoit, and Glenn J. Hansen, “Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning, 1952–2000,” Political Science Quarterly 118, no. 4 (2003): 599–626; John R. Petrocik, “Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study,” American Journal of Political Science 40, no. 3 (1996): 825–50 for a discussion of how issue ownership affects voter perceptions of parties in American politics.

62. Kibris, “Funerals and Elections”; Berrebi and Klor, “Are Voters Sensitive to Terrorism?.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anna O. Pechenkina

Anna O. Pechenkina is an assistant professor of Political Science at Utah State University. Her research concerns interstate and civil conflict management, resolution, and postwar peace stability.

Laura Gamboa

Laura Gamboa is an assistant professor of Political Science at Utah State University. Her research focuses on democratic erosion, voting behavior, and institutions in Latin America.