Coercion, governance, and political behavior in civil war
| Published date | 01 July 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221147939 |
| Author | Andres D Uribe |
| Date | 01 July 2024 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221147939
Journal of Peace Research
2024, Vol. 61(4) 529 –544
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221147939
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1225162JPR0010.1177/00223433221147939Journal of Peace ResearchUribe
research-article2023
Regular Article
Coercion, governance, and political
behavior in civil war
Andres D Uribe
Department of Political Science, University of Chicago
Abstract
How do armed actors affect the outcome of elections? Recent scholarship on electoral violence shows that armed
groups use violence against voters to coerce them to abstain or vote for the group’s allies. Yet this strategy is risky:
coercion can alienate civilians and trigger state repression. I argue that armed actors have another option. A wide
range of armed groups create governance institutions to forge ties of political authority with civilian communities,
incorporating local populations into armed groups’ political projects and increasing the credibility of their messaging.
The popular support, political mobilization, and social control enabled by governance offer a means to sway voters’
political behavior without resorting to election violence. I assess this argument in the context of the Peruvian civil
war, in which Shining Path insurgents leveraged wealth redistribution and political propaganda to influence voting
behavior. Archival evidence, time series analysis of micro-level violent event data, and a synthetic control study
provide support for these claims. These results have implications for theories of electoral violence, governance by
non-state actors, and political behavior in war-torn societies.
Keywords
electoral violence, political behavior, rebel governance
Introduction
In 1980, Peru democratized after a 12-year spell of mil-
itary dictatorship. The May 1980 municipal elections
were dominated by the centrist Popular Action party,
which also swept the presidency and both houses of
Congress. But an unusual pattern materialized in the
election returns. In 16 of Peru’s 150 provinces – mostly
provinces scattered across the rural Andean highlands –
over 40% of votes were not cast in favor of any party.
Rather, these ballots were either left blank or spoiled,
deliberately or accidentally marked so as to render the
ballot invalid.
A number of factors could lead voters to cast a blank
or spoiled ballot. Peru has had compulsory voting since
1933, so voters forced to turn out may have left ballots
blank out of apathy; others may have unintentionally
spoiled their ballots. But the quantity of blank-and-
spoiled ballots was surprising. In Peru’s most recent
municipal elections, in 1966, only one province had
recorded more than 40% blank-and-spoiled votes. By
the 1983 elections, 28 provinces had crossed that
threshold.
What else could explain this pattern? Latin American
democracies have a long tradition of protest balloting:
voters casting intentionally blank or null votes as a rejec-
tion of the political options on offer or the electoral
system itself (Driscoll & Nelson, 2014). In the case of
Peru, this explosion in blank-and-null ballots coincided
with the rise of the maoist insurgent group Shining Path.
Shining Path, which sought the overthrow of the dem-
ocratic state, pressured voters to either boycott elections
or to cast a blank or spoiled ballot in protest. Large
amounts of blank-and-null voting would represent a
symbolically powerful repudiation of democracy; suffi-
ciently high levels would cause elections to be annulled.
Many of the provinces where blank-and-spoiled ballots
Corresponding author:
uribe@uchicago.edu
530 journal of P R 61(4)
were most prevalent were also areas in which Shining
Path was present.
Existing accounts of how armed groups intervene in
elections suggest a straightforward connection between
Shining Path’s presence and high levels of protest vot-
ing.
1
Scholarship on armed actors and elections centers
on electoral violence: how armed groups use threats and
acts of violence to coerce voters to turn out, stay home,
or vote for the group’s preferred candidates. The frame-
work seems a natural fit to the case of Shining Path,
which is widely conceived of as a radically violent orga-
nization with little concern for civilian welfare (Wein-
stein, 2006).
Indeed, the insurgents were brutally violent against
civilians throughout the war. Shining Path combatants
committed widespread abuses, including the killing or
disappearance of tens of thousands of largely poor and
indigenous rural residents. Yet the historical record belies
the hypothesis that Shining Path coerced voters into
casting protest ballots through violence: the eight local
and national elections held during the war saw no incline
in insurgent victimization of civilians.
How, then, do we understand the sharp increase in
protest voting in Shining Path-influenced areas? How do
armed actors affect electoral outcomes? I argue that a
narrow focus on electoral violence misses a key channel
through which armed actors like Shining Path influence
elections. Beyond directly threatening voters to abstain,
protest vote, or vote for their preferred candidates, armed
groups like Shining Path can wield coercive power in
indirect ways to sway political behavior. The ability to
use violence converts armed actors into potential political
authorities. Armed groups build a wide range of formal
and informal governance institutions, from courts and
policing to government councils, schools, and health and
humanitarian services (Huang, 2016). These institutions
forge ties of political authority between armed actors and
civilians, incorporating local populations into armed
groups’ political projects and increasing the credibility
of their messaging.
I argue that armed actors can draw on these relation-
ships of political authority to influence the political beha-
vior of voters. For armed groups like Shining Path, which
developed complex institutions of social organization
and wealth redistribution, the popular support, political
mobilization, and social control enabled by governance
offer a means to sway voters’ political behavior without
resorting to election violence. Both groups that seek to
discredit democracy, like Shining Path, and those that
aim to channel votes to particular candidates, like some
militias and paramilitary groups, can employ this strategy
to appeal to voters. This approach holds important stra-
tegic advantages over the direct use of coercion, which
risks both alienating the civilians that militants rely on
for political and material support and triggering state
repression.
To assess this argument, I draw on a combination of
qualitative and quantitative evidence about Shining Path
governance, micro-level data on voting and violence
from 1980 to 1993, and a synthetic control case study
of governance and voter behavior in a province in the
Peruvian highlands. I find that Shining Path created a
diverse set of institutions for governance, influence, and
social control in communities it influenced, and that
these efforts to leverage relations of political authority
with civilians – not acts of violence against voters –
explained the high levels of protest balloting observed
during the war.
This article is organized in five parts. In the following
section, I provide a brief overview of the literature on
electoral violence and armed groups in democracy,
before outlining my theory of governance, authority
building, and political behavior. The fourth section eval-
uates the argument through an analysis of Shining Path’s
governance activities and its attempts to discredit democ-
racy and sway voters. The final section considers the
implications of this theory for scholarship on armed
group governance, electoral violence, and political
participation.
Armed groups and elections
A host of armed actors have a deep interest in elections
and their outcomes. The reasons for this interest are
many. Democratic regimes derive legitimacy from the
ability to conduct free and fair elections. For insurgents
aiming to overthrow the state, the success or failure of
elections affects public and international support for the
government’s political pro ject. The outcomes of elec-
tions also matter: for secessionist groups, elections and
referenda may lead directly to increased autonomy or
independence. Paramilitary organizations and profit-
oriented criminal groups have their own electoral stakes.
Election outcomes shape their ability to wage state-
sanctioned violence, avoid crackdowns on illicit econo-
mies, gain immunity from prosecution, and further their
broader political agendas. A wide range of armed actors
1
Throughout this article, I use the terms ‘armed groups,’ ‘armed
actors,’ and ‘militants’ interchangeably to refer to organized, non-
state entities capable of wielding force to achieve political ends.
2journal of PEACE RESEARCH XX(X)
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