TY  - JOUR
AU  - Chacon,Mario
AU  - Robinson,James A.
AU  - Torvik,Ragnar
TI  - When is Democracy an Equilibrium?: Theory and Evidence from Colombia's "La Violencia"
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12789
PY  - 2006
Y2  - December 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12789
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12789.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Mario Chacon
Yale Univ., Dept. of Political Science
PO Box 208301
New Haven, CT 06520-8301
E-Mail: Mario.Chacon@Yale.edu

James A. Robinson
Harvard University
Department of Government
N309, 1737 Cambridge Street
Cambridge, MA  02138
Tel: 617/496-2839
Fax: 617/495-0438
E-Mail: jrobinson@gov.harvard.edu

Ragnar Torvik
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Department of Economics
N-7491 Trondheim
Norway
E-Mail: ragnar.torvik@svt.ntnu.no
AB  - The conventional wisdom in political science is that for a democracy to be consolidated, all groups must have a chance to attain power. If they do not then they will subvert democracy and choose to fight for power. In this paper we show that this wisdom is seriously incomplete because it considers absolute, not relative payoffs. Although the probability of winning an election increases with the size of a group, so does the probability of winning a fight. Thus 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. Indeed, in a natural model, we show that democracy may never be consolidated in such a situation. Rather, democracy may only be stable when one group is dominant. We provide a test of a key aspect of our model using data from "La Violencia", a political conflict in Colombia during the years 1946-1950 between the Liberal and Conservative parties. Consistent with our results, and contrary to the conventional wisdom, we show that fighting between the parties was more intense in municipalities where the support of the parties was more evenly balanced.
ER  -