Political Openness and Armed Conflict: Evidence from Local Councils in Colombia

In this paper, I investigate empirically the impact of increasing political openness on conflict-related violence. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the designated number of councillors in Colombian... [ view full abstract ]

In this paper, I investigate empirically the impact of increasing political openness on conflict-related violence. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the designated number of councillors in Colombian municipalities, I develop two sets of results. First, regression discontinuity estimates show that in larger municipal councils a considerably higher number of political parties have at least one elected representative. I interpret this result as providing evidence that larger councils are more open to direct representation of more groups in the population. The estimates also reveal that third parties are the main beneficiaries of this greater political openness. Second, regression discontinuity estimates show that political openness substantially decreases conflict-related violence, primarily the killing of civilian non-combatants. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in local election results, I show that the lower level of political violence stems from a greater participation by parties with close links to the armed groups. Using information about the types of violence employed by those groups, the provision of local public goods, fiscal outcomes and coca cultivation,  I argue that armed violence has decreased not because of power-sharing arrangements, but rather because the armed group with less political power and visibility is deterred from initiating certain types of violence.