Guerrillas and Authoritarians: Partners in Post-War Polarization

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Organizations and Parties & Elections and Voting Behavior
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Parties and Interest Groups

Abstract

What factors explain the performance of political parties formed from armed insurgencies in post-war elections? Despite a violent and extremist past, some armed insurgent groups are able to abandon their arms and successfully contest power through elections, becoming important players in post-war legislative politics while others fail to capture more than a marginal vote share. This article introduces a new framework for understanding insurgent successor party entry based on the nature of electoral competition, especially the composition of the post-war party system. The analysis focuses on two considerations deterministic of post-war party system composition: whether the insurgent group achieved military victory over the state and if organizational successors to a former authoritarian government contest power in the post-war electoral arena. These two factors suggest three distinct types of electoral arenas that insurgent successor parties enter. Entering electoral competition after an absolute victory over the state is the most advantageous, but the results counterintuitively suggest that when victory is unachievable, the next best option is to make peace with and compete against a well-organized authoritarian successor party. Wars waged against democratic regimes or vanishing authoritarians are demonstrated to result in weaker insurgent successor party performance in post-war elections. Qualitative analysis of individual cases suggest that maintaining the same opponent in war and peace minimizes the need for organizational transformation between insurgency and electoral political party as wartime organizational principles meant to unify against an authoritarian regime can function with little change against the regime’s electoral successors. Wartime allies are therefore incentivized to stick together in a common electoral front so as to maximize their chances of defeating the authoritarian successors. Without an authoritarian successor party effectively contesting power, this incentive is weakened or disappears completely as the logic of competition experiences a more radical shift from war to peace. While most analyses of insurgent successor party success emphasize organizational change, this finding suggests that these parties rely more on consistency across the post-war transition and that a reliable path to relevancy in electoral politics lies in capturing a preexisting anti-system pole within an electorate deeply polarized along an old war-time cleavage. This path to electoral success makes former guerrillas and former authoritarians unwitting allies in maintaining wartime divisions long after the end of armed hostilities.

Author

• Jacob Turner, University of Notre Dame