Considering concessions: A survey experiment on the Colombian peace process

Abstract

Designing peace agreements that can be signed and sustained can be difficult in civil conflict. Many recent cases of successful settlements include electoral provisions, often for rebel groups to participate as political parties. Engaging the electoral process, however, can also open the peace process to the population at large, potentially derailing a settlement or some of its provisions, perhaps especially those related to politics. In this paper, we examine popular support for peace processes, specific electoral provisions, and potential concessions that provide former rebels with protections, legitimacy, and power. Using a survey experiment in Colombia, we find that the peace process overall is more popular than its electoral provisions, and that rebel endorsement of the provisions further diminishes support. These results contribute to an explanation of why the 2016 Colombian plebiscite on the peace agreement failed and to an understanding of how design matters to agreement effectiveness.

If They Endorse It, I Can't Trust It: How Outgroup Leader Endorsements Undercut Public Support for Civil War Peace Settlements

“…However, these latter studies interpret changes in support due to an endorsing party as solely indicating individuals' underlying support for that party, independent of the policies that parties are said to endorse. In our context-one characterized by a high degree of violence, distrust, and low informationwe echo Garbiras-Díaz, Garcia-Sanchez, and Matanock (2019) and Matanock and Garbiras-Díaz (2018) in our expectation that endorsements of policies will change individuals' support for those policies not solely because of the endorser's identity but also because their endorsements of policies convey information about the costs and benefits of those policies. Figure 1 displays our experiment design.…”

“…Divergent findings in Garbiras-Díaz, Garcia-Sanchez, and Matanock 2019and Matanock and Garbiras-Díaz (2018) in Colombia may highlight how endorsements from outgroups that have engaged in violence are perceived as particularly negative signals of a policy's merits. When the outgroup elite is a politician one holds in low esteem (but who has not violently targeted supporters of the alternative elite), his endorsement does not result in decreases in support for peace provisions (Garbiras-Díaz, Garcia-Sanchez, and Matanock 2019).…”

Who Shot the Bullets? Exposure to Violence and Attitudes Toward Peace: Evidence from the 2016 Colombian Referendum

“…Given this intense campaign leading up to the referendum, the high levels of political polarization that characterized the peace process, and the complexity of the agreement (laid out in a three-hundred-page document), scholars have looked at how both the referendum campaign and the agreement's design shaped people's vote. In fact, some of the agreement's provisions and concessions (Matanock and Garbiras-Díaz 2018;Tellez 2019a) and the role of campaign information and arguments (Masullo and Morisi 2019a) have been found to have shaped Colombians' attitudes toward the peace agreement. This study takes a different perspective and explores whether exposure to violence shaped vote choice in the 2016 referendum.…”

La distopía de la verdad: el miedo social en el atentado de Charlie Hebdo

“…En noviembre de 2016, el diccionario Oxford eligió la palabra "posverdad" como palabra del año, y la definió como aquellas "circunstancias relacionadas o denotadas en las que los hechos objetivos son menos influyentes en la formación de la opinión pública que los llamamientos a la emoción y a la creencia personal" (Oxford Dictionary, 2016) 2 . Esta definición ha servido como base conceptual para analizar desde diferentes perspectivas fenómenos sociopolíticos recientes como la victoria de Donald Trump (Vinha, 2018), el Brexit (Sparks, 2017;Walters y Watters, 2017) o, en el caso latinoamericano, la abstención del voto en el referéndum de paz en Colombia (Matanock & Garbiras-Díaz, 2018), el triunfo de Macri en Argentina (Schiumerini, 2016) o el enjuiciamiento político a Dilma Rousseff en Brasil (Mair, 2017).…”