Legacies of Political Violence and Voter Behavior in Colombia

Abstract

Do legacies of politically motivated violence influence future or current electoral behaviour? How so? This article considers the question of the impact of violence on voter behaviour, specifically on elections that centred on issues of peace in contexts of long-running civil conflict. This study theorises the ways in which decades of violence, and continued contexts of unevenly distributed violence during elections, impacts current electoral behaviour. This article explores whether continued exposure to violence makes voters more or less conciliatory in their political preferences as expressed through electoral institutions. To do this, the article utilises the second round of voting in the 2014 and 2018 Colombian presidential elections and the 2016 plebiscite vote on the peace accords with the leftist guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, along with a data set that records politically motivated violent events perpetrated by insurgents, counterinsurgents, and the state forces at a municipal level from 1991 to 2012.