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How Do Violent Politicians Govern? The Case of Paramilitary-Tied Mayors in Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2021

Sarah Zukerman Daly Open the ORCID record for Sarah Zukerman Daly [Opens in a new window]
Sarah Zukerman Daly*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, USA
*
Corresponding author. Email: sd2623@columbia.edu
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Abstract

How do politicians with coercive linkages govern? This article relies on original data on militia-linked mayors in Colombia from 1988 to 2015 derived from 42,000 pages of Colombian Supreme Court sentencing documents. Using a regression discontinuity design, it examines the governance records of militia-tied mayors who won the elections by a narrow margin. It finds that being ruled by a militia-linked mayor significantly reduces levels of insecurity and crime, but has pernicious effects on the provision of other public goods, especially education. I theorize that these politicians' (perverse) comparative advantage on security, combined with their crowding out of social spending, engenders these outcomes. I evaluate these mechanisms with data on the nature of paramilitary–mayor alliances, police reinforcements, municipal budgets, politicians' Twitter feeds, and in-depth interviews with paramilitary commanders and politicians. The article has implications for understanding the effects of voting for politicians with coercive ties on the quality of governance and democracy.

Keywords

violenceelectionspublic goodssecurityregression discontinuity
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 1852 - 1875
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Daly Dataset

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https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/K1A9U0
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