Endogenous State Weakness in Violent Democracies: Paramilitaries at the Polls
نویسندگان
چکیده
State weakness can be self-reinforcing through electoral channels. Paramilitaries flourish where states are incapable of eliminating oppositional foes like insurgencies; paramilitaries can also, we argue, penetrate the state via elections and further weaken it from within. The state may thus tolerate paramilitaries initially, but find itself unable to eliminate them later. Rio de Janeiro’s police-linked milı́cias demonstrate these mechanisms at work. Their domination of hundreds of slums bore political fruit in 2006, when paramilitary leaders and allies were elected state legislators. We exploit the timing of paramilitary expansion, identifying— through difference-in-differences analysis of polling-station returns—a substantial positive effect of territorial domination on paramilitary-aligned candidates’ vote share. Qualitative and quantitative evidence shows that winning allied legislators consistently sought to weaken state repression against paramilitaries, possibly contributing to their resilience even after an exogenous increase in state repression since 2008. Electioneering by armed groups thus presents a threat to democratic state consolidation. ∗Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. †Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Chicago.
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تاریخ انتشار 2015