Legislating during war: Conflict and politics in Colombia

Juan Morales

Journal of Public Economics, 2021, vol. 193, issue C

Abstract: This paper studies how politicians and their constituents respond to political violence by investigating the Colombian civil conflict. I use data on rebel attacks, legislators’ tweets, and roll-call votes, and I employ event-study and difference-in-differences empirical methods. After rebel attacks, Twitter engagement (as a proxy for popular support) increased both for incumbent-party legislators’ tweets and for legislators’ tweets using hard-line language. Legislators increased their support for the incumbent party after attacks but only when the government had a hard-line policy position as inferred both from the recent historical context and from text analysis of the president’s tweets. Though the effects were initially large, they lasted less than two weeks. The empirical results are consistent with a political economy model of legislative behaviour in which violent events, that produce rally-‘round-the-flag effects and shift voters’ views, elicit different responses from politicians depending on the policy position of the incumbent party. Finally, I identify a set of potentially affected congressional votes, revealing that these conflict-induced swings in incumbent support can have persistent policy consequences.

Keywords: Civil conflict; Legislative decision making; Roll-call votes; Political language; Social media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 H56 O10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272720301894
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Legislating during war: Conflict and politics in Colombia (2018)
Working Paper: Legislating during war: Conflict and politics in Colombia (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:193:y:2021:i:c:s0047272720301894

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104325

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba

More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().