1. The Participation Gap: The Role of Ex-Belligerents in Post-Civil War Elections
Duu (Jason) Renn
Department of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Make sure to pull out cases where governments are excluded (these aren’t just the result of rebel victories).
Note that the international factors matter (multidimensional peacekeeping) for participation but not election outcomes.
Rebels win sometimes (18 times) but their electoral success is even more rare (11) and not enough information exists to predict their performance.
Report marginal effects for H2
[Figure: Government Voteshare/Seatshare
Difference in mean voteshare/seatshare by war outcome and difference with monitors]
Governments win all the time, carrying an electoral advantage in both executive and legislative contests when they win the war or settle. Monitors and polity decrease the likelihood of
[Figure: Rebel Voteshare/Seatshare]
Rebels lose. Political experience doesn’t matter in election outcomes. International monitors help them gain more votes.
Qualifications and description of cases. Some discussion of typical cases
Data do not match the scope or findings of some other projects. More data collection? Can we automate and replicate?
What happens to the vast majority of ex-belligerents? They are not in positions of political power nor are the capable of returning to the battlefield (repression and low-level political violence – see RENAMO)
What’s the Point of Post-War Elections?
In the aftermath of civil war, the vast majority of states conduct elections. What role do ex- belligerents play in these elections? Using a new dataset that tracks wartime actors and their political parties through the post-war election process, this project examines a series of questions designed to build a better understanding of post-civil war politics.
Who participates in these elections? Who wins? I weigh the role of material or military strength against the influence of democratic institutions, both domestic and internationally-imposed, to see whether post-war elections are best understood as a continuation of conflict bargaining or a credible, institutionalized alternative to violence.
Hypotheses
What determines participation?
H1a: Parity in material/military strength leads to participation; a lack of parity leads to exclusion.
H1b: Democratic institutions increase the likelihood of participation for all parties.
What determines election outcomes?
H2a: Parity in material/military strength leads to more equitable electoral outcomes.
H2b: Democratic institutions lead to more equitable electoral outcomes.
Research Design
There are 305 civil wars in the sample, each representing a conflict dyad. Group-specific election outcomes are limited to approximately 260 cases.
Dependent Variables
Both Government and Rebels participate in the post-war election. [0,1]
Voteshare and seatshare for election. [0,100]
Independent Variables
Material Power: War Outcome [Decisive, Peace Agreement, Low Level Conflict]
Political Institutions: Previous Multiparty [0,1]; International Election Monitoring [0,1]
Controls and Alternative Measures
Conflict Duration, Conflict Severity, Peacekeeping Mission, Military Intervention, Cold War, Economic Wealth, Previous Political Wing, Relative Power During Conflict
Methods
Logit for binary outcomes
OLS for voteshare/seatshare
Conflict fixed effects/Country fixed effects
H2: Both power and institution-based explanations receive some support. Victors (typically governments) tend to win post-war elections and win big, by an average margin of more than 50% in both vote share and seat share. Peace agreements and parity are associated with more competitive elections.
War losers (typically rebels) are not winning elections, but neither are war winners in many cases. Other opposition parties (not former belligerents) are more likely to win executive office and large portions of the legislative seat share when democratic institutions are strong or international actors monitor elections.
The data present a number of challenges for valid statistical inference. The paucity of rebel victories and participation as well as path dependency in the war-to-elections process create data that are highly collinear. While inference may be misleading, simple descriptions of the data are still useful.
Election Outcomes (Executive) and War Outcomes
Government Wins War
Rebels Win War
Settlement/
Low Level
Government wins Election 4 24
144
Rebels win Election 11
Other Party Wins Election 3 8 70
Data Collection
Temporal range:
Case Selection
Armed Conflict Dataset (ACD)
Non-state Actor Dataset (NSA)
National Election Across Democracies and Autocracies (NELDA)
Global News Archive
Over 85 million digitized newspaper articles from global and local sources
Rule for Belligerent-Political Party Linkage
Shared Leadership
Shared Organization Structure/Name
Literature and Theory
Early works on post-war elections suggest that quick post-war elections lead to repeated violence (Brancati and Snyder 2011, 2013; Flores and Nooruddin 2012). This work does not examine participation directly.
When looking at rebel participation, Ishiyama and Marshall (2016) find that excluding rebel groups increases the risks of recurrence. New works have looked at the determinants of rebel participation (Manning and Smith 2016; Kovacs and Hatz 2016) but are limited in their approach and data – specifically, they do not include government actors or outcomes outside of peace agreements.
Rationalist explanations of war (Fearon 1995) and theories of democratic consolidation (Pzeworkski 2005; Fearon 2011) suggest that we should examine joint participation in post-war elections as the first step in understanding conflict recurrence and regime change as such processes are dyadic.
Results and Analysis
H1: War outcomes are the only significant predictor of participation in the full model. Democratic institutions have no effect.
Note that participation is uncommon, but exists across all war outcomes.
Conclusion
Who benefits from post-war elections and how? According to the data, the vast majority of rebel organizations do not even participate. And while post-war elections favour governments, domestic and international pressure may actually lead to incumbents losing power.
Why then do so many civil wars end with elections? Are the only leaders holding post- war elections ones that know that they can win, and if so, what happens to the other belligerents? Future research could examine this by collecting more information on the reasons for non-participation and exclusion. or
Election Participation v. War Outcome
Decisive Victory
Settlement
Low Level
~ Participation 49
123 43
Participation 4 10 11