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Politics

Democracy’s Discontents

To end a civil war and establish a democracy, you need to give every faction a sense that it can attain power peacefully—or so runs the political-science conventional wisdom. But a new paper begs to differ. Using the case of Colombia’s mid-century civil war, known as “La Violencia,” in which the country’s Liberal and Conservative parties formed militias and fought one another, the authors find that the interparty warfare was most intense in municipalities where the two parties were evenly matched and had roughly equal chances of taking power through peaceful means. Thus their proposed alternative model of political conflict holds that “in a situation where all groups have a high chance of winning an election, they may also have a high chance of winning a fight,” and so be more likely to choose open war, with its chance for a winner-take-all outcome, over the ...