How Wartime Institutions Shape Electoral Performance after Civil Conflicts

• In Event: The Impact of Civil War Settlements on Citizens’ Attitudes and Agency

Abstract

How does citizens’ involvement in wartime institutions shape the electoral geography of war-to-democracy transitions? Successful rebel-to-party transformations are a critical ingredient of post-war democratization. Yet we only have a limited understanding of how these transformations vary geographically within the post-conflict political landscape and how this geographical variation affects the electoral performance and mobilization strategies of parties of former rebel groups. Addressing this gap, we argue that the electoral performance of rebels-turned-parties is a function of their ability to transform wartime military and civilian networks into political campaign machines. This ability varies with the geographic extent of and civilian involvement in wartime institutions: In areas where rebels institutionalized strategic control during war, they can activate former networks by distributing economic benefits, appeal to political identities generated during the war, and credibly promise political and security returns on their implementation of the peace deal. We implement a two-step mixed method design to test these proposition using the empirical case of the Indonesian province of Aceh. First, we quantitatively investigate the relationship between strategic wartime control on electoral performance in several post-conflict election rounds. Second, we use propensity score matching to select areas with/without strong GAM presence for focus groups discussion that enable us to trace the different political mobilization strategies.

Authors

• Felix Haass, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies

• Martin Ottmann, University of Birmingham