Political leaders make policy choices which are often hard to explain via institutions. We use the behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups as an environment to study non-institutional sources of variation in how public good provision and violence are combined to control populations. We hypothesize that a significant source of variation stems from the social preferences of the paramilitary commanders. Reciprocators adopt a strategy of offering public goods in exchange for support, but also use violence to punish those who do not reciprocate back. Reciprocity, developed via childhood socialization, is a characteristic of rural “peasants”. We develop a model which generates these hypotheses and test them using a unique dataset compiled from transitional justice documents.
Authors
Maria Angélica Bautista, Juan Sebastián Galán, James A. Robinson, Rafael F. Torres, Ragnar Torvik
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We thank Daron Acemoglu, Eli Berman, Marianne Bertrand, Tim Besley, Chris Blattman, Ernesto Dal Bó, Melissa Dell, Oeindrila Dube, Marcela Eslava, Fred Finan, Paul Gertler, Leander Heldring, Benjamin Lessing, Roger Myerson, Torsten Persson, Juan Felipe Riaño, Guido Tabellini, Santiago Torres, Bertil Tungodden, María Alejandra Vélez and seminar participants at the universities and conferences of Andrés Bello, Berkeley, CESifo Venice Summer Institute, Chicago IOG Conference, Emory, Georgetown, RIDGE Sustainable Growth Forum, Los Andes, LSE, Manchester, Michigan, NYU, Newcastle, Norwegian School of Economics, Oslo, PUC Chile and San Diego for useful feedback and comments. María Teresa Ronderos and Juan Diego Restrepo provided invaluable information and assistance for our fieldwork. We are grateful to Nicolás Cabra, Alejandro Camelo, Alan Gómez, Sofia Granados, Laura Grandas, María Adelaida Martínez, Germán Orbegozo, Pilar Puentes, Jennifer Rincón, Laura Soto, and Juan Pablo Uribe for outstanding research assistance. We thank the Becker-Friedman Institute for its generous financial support, in particular the Political Economy Initiative and the BFI-LATAM collaboration with the Universidad Andrés Bello. All remaining errors are our own. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w33011
- Pages
- 108
- Published in
- United States of America
Table of Contents
- In-Paper Appendix 50
- Appendix Variable Descriptions and Sources 51
- Supplemental Appendix 55
- Appendix Colombian Paramilitarism 55
- Paramilitary Strategies 55
- Peasant Commanders Preferences 59
- Appointment of Front Commanders 62
- Front Boundaries 66
- Appendix A Model of Paramilitary Strategy 68
- Citizens, Policy and Reciprocity 68
- Utility of Citizens 70
- Timing of Events 70
- Main Assumption and Equilibrium 71
- The Evolution of Reciprocal Preferences 73
- Appendix Data Construction 78
- Commanders Data 78
- Front Data 80
- Appendix Robustness Checks 88
- Figures 90
- Tables 94
- Falsification Test 104
- References 106
