Mitigating the Past, Securing the Future: How Bloodstained Parties Win Elections

• In Event: Political Violence in Democracies

Abstract

In postwar elections, pivotal to political order, justice, and democracy, a surprisingly large number of citizens vote for bloodstained parties. How do these actors guilty of violence seek votes? When and why would a victimized population elect its tormentors to govern it? This paper develops a counterintuitive answer: that belligerent parties, if militarily victorious, campaign as and become deemed the most credible providers of future societal peace: Restrained Leviathans. Conjoint experiments embedded in a survey of 1,510 victims and non-victims in Colombia offer empirical support for the framework. The data cast doubt on alternatives—the fog of war and electoral coercion—and reveal a role for security voting even when considering economic voting, partisanship, and clientelism. This paper utilizes the frameworks of political behavior to understand a critical question in international relations: how civil war belligerents offer peace as political parties, and the conditions under which former victims choose to elect them.

Author

• Sarah Zukerman Daly, Columbia University