Political life after civil wars: Introducing the Civil War Successor Party dataset

AuthorSarah Zukerman Daly
DOI10.1177/0022343320920905
Published date01 July 2021
Date01 July 2021
Political life after civil wars: Introducing the
Civil War Successor Party dataset
Sarah Zukerman Daly
Department of Political Science, Columbia University
Abstract
Around the world, following civil wars, rebel and government belligerents contest and win the founding postwar
elections. Despite the prevalence of these elections and their importance in setting post-conflict environments on
specific political trajectories, their outcomes have been understudied. Existing scholarship centers on the timing and
institutions of the postwar elections, but not on their party and voter participants. This article introduces a dataset
which traces the postwar political trajectories of civil war belligerents, identifies their successor parties, charts their
electoral performance, and documents their decision to remilitarize or demilitarize. The Civil War Successor Party
(CWSP) dataset covers all belligerents that have transitioned from civil conflict in the period 1970–2015. The article
describes the contours of the dataset, reveals patterns of political life after wars, and outlines the potential uses of the
dataset for future research. In particular, it suggests how the data may be leveraged by scholars and practitioners to
understand dynamics of political behavior, patterns of governance and public goods provision, quality of democracy,
and recurrence of low- and high-intensity war in the aftermath of mass violence.
Keywords
civil war, dataset, elections, peace, political legacies
Introduction
Civil war successor parties emerge out of almost every
conflict termination and remain important figures in the
politics of countries transitioning from war to peace. To
understand the politics of countries recovering from con-
flict, it is critical to understand the electoral fates of civil
war belligerents. How do parties derived from rebel and
government belligerents perform in founding post-war
elections? Why does their performance vary? And what
are the implications of these electoral results for peace,
democracy, governance, and justice?
In this article, I present the Civil War Successor Party
dataset (CWSP), which traces the political legacies of
armed conflict and the contours of electoral politics after
mass violence in the period 1970–2015. More specifi-
cally, my goal is to place civil war successor parties on the
map as key actors in the transition from war to peace.
The dataset documents 205 civil war belligerents’ polit-
ical postwar trajectories. It builds on the important work
of scholars who study the timing of postwar elections
(Brancati & Snyder, 2012; Flores & Nooruddin,
2012; Reilly, 2002), the institutions structuring the elec-
tions (Hartzell & Hoddie, 2007; Mattes & Savun, 2009;
Walter, 1999), and the provisions allowing for rebels to
participate in the elections (Marshall & Ishiyama, 2016;
Matanock, 2017). CWSP adds to this body of scholar-
ship how the parties perform in the elections. While the
existing literature focuses exclusively on rebel parties,
CWSP covers successor parties derived from the govern-
ment belligerent, rendering our understanding of post-
war politics more complete. It further contributes to data
on conflict termination and resumption. It carefully
examines each case of conflict termination to verify that
a meaningful cessation of hostilities took place. Rather
than code war recurrence at the country or conflict level,
CWSP codes remilitarization at the organizational level,
Corresponding author:
sd2623@columbia.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2021, Vol. 58(4) 839–848
ªThe Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0022343320920905
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