Working Paper: NBER ID: w18313
Authors: Leopoldo Fergusson; James A. Robinson; Ragnar Torvik; Juan F. Vargas
Abstract: We develop a political economy model where some politicians have a comparative advantage in undertaking a task and this gives them an electoral advantage. This creates an incentive to underperform in the task in order to maintain their advantage. We interpret the model in the context of fighting against insurgents in a civil war and derive two main empirical implications which we test using Colombian data during the presidency of Álvaro Uribe. First, as long as rents from power are sufficiently important, large defeats for the insurgents should reduce the probability that politicians with comparative advantage, President Uribe, will fight the insurgents. Second, this effect should be larger in electorally salient municipalities. We find that after the three largest victories against the FARC rebel group, the government reduced its efforts to eliminate the group and did so differentially in politically salient municipalities. Our results therefore support the notion that such politicians need enemies to maintain their political advantage and act so as to keep the enemy alive.
Keywords: political economy; civil war; insurgency; Colombia; electoral incentives
JEL Codes: D72
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Uribe's consejos comunales (D70) | Decrease in military activity in electorally salient municipalities (H56) |
| Decrease in military activity against FARC (H56) | Uribe's electoral advantage (K16) |
| Large defeats for FARC (D74) | Decrease in military activity against FARC (H56) |