The Making of Democrats: Elections and Party Development in Postwar Bosnia, El Salvador, and Mozambique

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The Making of Democrats

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The Making of Democrats Elections and Party Development in Postwar Bosnia, El Salvador, and Mozambique

Carrie Manning

the making of democrats Copyright © Carrie Manning, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60030-0 ISBN-10: 0-230-60030-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Manning, Carrie L., 1964– The making of democrats: elections and party development in postwar Bosnia, El Salvador, and Mozambique / by Carrie Manning. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-60030-1 (alk. paper) 1. Political parties—Mozambique. 2. Political parties—Bosnia and Hercegovina. 3. Political parties—El Salvador. 4. Democracy. 5. Peacebuilding. I. Title JQ3671.A979M36 2008 324.209’049—dc22

2007033480

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: April 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

Contents List of Tables and Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Elections, Democratization, and State Building

1

1 Parties as Mediators of Political Change

13

2 Mozambique: Electoral Politics and the Underdevelopment of Renamo

43

3 Bosnia: HDZ, SDS, and the Three-Level Game

73

4 El Salvador: Local Elections and Change in the FMLN

115

Conclusion

141

Notes

157

Selected Bibliography

183

Index

193


Tables and Figures Figure 2.1 Country Map of the Republic of Mozambique

42

Table 2.1 Presidential Election Results for Frelimo and Renamo, 1994–2004

51

Table 2.2 Legislative Election Results, Frelimo and Renamo, 1994–2004

51

Figure 3.1 Country Map of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina

72

Table 3.1 Entity-Level Election Results for Wartime Nationalist Parties and Their Closest Competitors, 1996–2006 (Percentage of vote)

82

Figure 4.1 Country Map of the Republic of El Salvador

114

Table 4.1 Presidential Election Results for ARENA and FMLN, 1994–2004 (Percentage of vote)

119

Table 4.2 Legislative Election Results for ARENA and FMLN, 1994–2006

119

Table 4.3 Municipalities Controlled by ARENA and FMLN, 1994–2006

119


Acknowledgments While writing and researching this book, I have had the good fortune to be associated with a disproportionate number of generous individuals and institutions. The Fulbright Institute for International Education, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Georgia State University Research Foundation provided grants for empirical research in Mozambique, Bosnia, and El Salvador. I am enormously grateful to Ana Margarita Chavez, Mike Scanlan, Miljenko Antic, Miguel de Brito, and Sid Bliss for their friendship and guidance during the empirical stages of this research. My participation in a seminar on civil–military relations in El Salvador helped facilitate my research there, and I thank Tom Bruneau and Rich Hoffman at the Center for Civil–Military Relations (CCMR) for getting me there. I am indebted to John Harbeson, Donald Rothchild, Anne Pitcher, Laura Dull, Peter von Doepp, Terrence Lyons, and countless long-suffering conference audiences, copanelists, and discussants over the years who have helped me to hone the ideas at the center of this book. In particular, I would like to thank Vince Boudreau and Mary Callahan and their public affairs students, whose 2005 workshops on Building Democracy were tremendously helpful in exploring many of the ideas set out here. I would also like to thank Claire and Mark Dryden and Anna and Glenn Berry, four of the finest people I know, without whose friendship and hospitality this book could not have been finished. I’d like to thank Anthony Wahl at Palgrave and Vanja Petricevic for research assistance in Atlanta. Finally, as ever, I am indebted to John, Alex, and Carson, who continually remind me of what really matters.


INTRODUCTION

Elections, Democratization, and State Building

C

an elections, in some sense, create democrats? Nearly forty years ago, Dankwart Rustow suggested that they could. He argued that politicians who initially agreed to follow democratic procedures for purely pragmatic reasons might, over time, come to support those procedures as ends in themselves, particularly if they found the new rules useful for the satisfaction of their own goals. As he put it, “the very process of democracy institutes a double process of Darwinian selectivity in favor of convinced democrats: one among parties in general elections and the other among politicians vying for leadership within these parties.”1 Since 1990, dozens of new formal democracies have been founded on this principle. International actors in particular have relied on elections and formal democratization to guide processes of reconstituting post-conflict states. Over most of the past two decades, elections have served as the starting point of democratization and state-building efforts in countries ranging from Angola to East Timor. In many of these cases, the top political contenders have included the leaders of armed rebel groups, warlords, and newly converted autocratic rulers. This would appear to make for fertile ground to explore the notion that democratization can be set in motion in the absence of committed democrats. It has become a common, though problematic, expectation in much of the scholarly and policy literature that democratization will provide a solid basis from which to address the daunting tasks of post-conflict state building.2 Though it is rarely stated so baldly, there is an underlying assumption in this literature that elections can create political actors who will behave in ways conducive to the construction of a peaceful democratic state. For example, the electoral success of Hamas and Hezbollah in 2006 brought renewed claims for the moderating power of participation in democratic

2 The Making of Democrats

politics. Summing up a view voiced by many, Robert Grenier wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece that “it may seem counterintuitive, but the best hope for American interests in the Middle East is not to isolate and minimize Hezbollah, but to further integrate it politically, socially, and militarily into the Lebanese state. . . . As Hezbollah becomes more enmeshed in Lebanese politics, . . . domestic political considerations will become increasingly influential in its calculations—a tendency that should be encouraged.” 3 Similarly, in Bosnia international policymakers suggested that elections would exert a moderating influence on the nationalist parties that had taken the country to war.4 In large part, these assumptions reflect the expectations of democracy promoters who have been active in supporting transitions to democratic rule in a broader set of cases. Thomas Carothers’s critique of the “transition paradigm,” for example, points out that many authors writing on democratization more generally have tended to hold very high expectations for what the establishment of regular, genuine elections will do for democratization. Not only will elections give new post-dictatorial governments democratic legitimacy, they believe, but the elections will serve to broaden and deepen political participation and the democratic accountability of the state to its citizens. In other words, it has been assumed that, in attempted transitions to democracy, elections will be not just a foundation stone but a key generator over time of further democratic reforms.5

Comparative scholarship on the relationship between elections and democracy in countries transitioning from authoritarian rule hardly provides unswerving support for making electoral politics the bedrock of state-building efforts in such cases. Empirically, the record of achievement, in terms of building stable political systems based on democratic rules of the game in post-conflict states, has been mixed. The commitment to holding regular, periodic elections has been consistent with both authoritarian and democratic political practices. There are longtime authoritarian or “electoral authoritarian” regimes—Mexico, South Korea, Ghana—that have developed into competitive electoral democracies. Then there are countries, like Guinea, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Togo, that have sustained electoralism over three electoral cycles but have little to show for it in terms of improvements in basic democratic indices. Electoralism—a commitment to holding regular, periodic elections—can seemingly give way to electoral democracy over time, but it can also sustain authoritarian regimes by giving them the cover they need to continue functioning, with little risk to incumbents.

Introduction 3

As a result, questions about the role of elections in state building and democratization remain the source of considerable controversy and interest in the scholarly literature on democratic development and on post-conflict politics. Some scholars, like Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, argue forcefully against making electoralism the basis of state building.6 “Pushing countries too soon into competitive electoral politics,” they maintain, “not only risks stoking war, sectarianism and terrorism, but it also makes the future consolidation of democracy more difficult.”7 Far from generating democrats, holding elections in the absence of a functioning state gives politicians incentives to exploit and widen existing societal cleavages and even to attack neighboring states. Roland Paris makes a similar argument in a comparative study of postconflict peace building, repeating Samuel P. Huntington’s refrain of institutionalization before liberalization.8 In the broader democratization literature, there is also a strong current of scholarship arguing that the emphasis on elections is misplaced. Scholars have regularly noted the absence of civil liberties and democratic values in countries that have held multiple elections.9 Richard Joseph argues that “electoralism has come to consume democratic efforts to the detriment of broader and more systematic transformations.”10 Some scholars have, however, begun to argue that even imperfect elections may have value for democracy over the long term. Staffan Lindberg, for example, maintains that the sheer repetition of elections, flawed or not, may well help to establish the foundations of democratic politics. He finds improvements in competitiveness, in participation, and in the propensity of opposition parties to accept electoral results over time. He also argues that multiple elections have produced measurable improvements in civil liberties in sub-Saharan African countries.11 Similarly, Terrence Lyons has emphasized the contribution of elections to conflict management and the demilitarization of politics in post-conflict settings.12 Argument of the Book These conflicting findings raise the question, when does electoralism promote the development of democracy, and when does it undermine it? Specifically, why do elections in some cases lead major political actors to invest more deeply in electoral politics, thereby helping to entrench democratic norms and institutions, while in other cases, elections seem to have little or even negative impact on the degree to which political elites accept the new rules of the game? In this book I argue that this puzzle can be addressed by engaging the neglected issue of political party development and the role that parties play in


mediating the application of the democratic rules of the game. The book’s central claim is that the repeated holding of elections, however imperfect, tends to create a constituency within parties for more elections. Whether or not that leads the party leadership to commit to or to invest in the democratic rules of the game depends on the interaction of the demands of interparty competition and internal party dynamics. The purpose of this book is to understand when and why these pressures lead parties to invest themselves more fully in democratic politics, rather than to subvert them. Party behavior can be most effectively understood through the lens of nested games. George Tsebelis maintains that “nested games [are] a way of transplanting context into game theory.” It allows us to take a rationalist approach to understanding the behavior of political actors without resorting to gross simplification.13 Although this book does not employ formal game theoretical methods, its analysis is informed by some of the key concepts of game theory. A number of scholars have taken a similar approach to the analysis of the relationship between electoral politics and party development or decline. Richard Rose and Thomas T. Mackie, for example, note that “because parties are organizations, all of their activities must be viewed in terms of two very different contexts: an introverted concern with what happens within the party qua organization and an extroverted concern with changes in the larger political environment of which the organization is a part.”14 Andreas Schedler points out that, in democratizing countries, electoral competition is embedded in the meta-game of institutional change, or changes in the set of rules governing elections. Thus opposition actors and incumbents are sometimes willing to accept what appear to be suboptimal outcomes in individual elections to pursue higher order goals such as control over the terms of electoral competition for the next time.15 The parties I examine in this book are indeed engaged in the nested game Schedler describes. But my focus is on yet another set of games, in which the two principal arenas are internal party politics and interparty competition. Interparty competition itself constitutes an example of what Tsebelis calls “games in multiple arenas,” for parties compete for executive and legislative power at the national level, and, in all of our cases, at subnational levels as well. Moreover, interparty competition occurs not only within the electoral arena, but also in parliament, and those arenas are governed by different rules and consequently have different dynamics. Thus all political party leaders in formally democratic political systems are engaged in an n-level game. Our focus here is on party leaders’ involvement in two of these levels—the

Introduction 5

struggle to maintain their position at the head of their parties and their struggle to prevail over other parties in electoral contests. The Significance of Parties Parties have long been considered the sine qua non of modern democracy. Democracy depends on the existence of competent political parties that are committed to democratic politics. When democracy is expected to sublimate military conflicts into political competition, parties might well be expected to play an even more important role. After all, it is the party that is expected to represent the interests of its constituents to government and in government—to shape the state in ways that respond to its constituents’ values and interests. In countries emerging out of civil war, the major parties represent former military adversaries in conflicts that resulted in stalemate on the battlefield, thus intensifying the importance of parties’ representative role and raising the stakes of political competition overall. The performance of political parties is likely to be even more important in this setting. The task of building such parties, however, is daunting. Political parties must be forged out of armed militia groups, many of which have had no experience or only a brief existence as a political party. Moreover, the democratic training ground for these nascent parties is rarely older than the parties themselves. Extensive international involvement over the last two decades in democratization, both in post-conflict cases and more broadly, has generated an impressive volume of research on how best to foster sustainable democratic politics. A sizeable literature on institutional design attempts to foresee and to influence the specific implications of electoral competition for such things as the types of political cleavages that will predominate, the type of party system that will emerge, the kinds of parties that will succeed or fail, or the kinds of strategies that rational political actors will use to try to achieve their goals. Analyses that argue in favor of centripetalist institutional designs for divided societies have tended to focus primarily on the impact of voting behavior. The task is to design electoral laws such that parties cannot win without broadening their appeals to voters. This is sound advice, but institutional design gives us only part of the story. Missing is a clear understanding of how institutional design affects the calculations and chances of would-be reformers within parties. More attention should be devoted to the factors that promote internal party development and the strengthening of parties as institutions that, themselves, can carry a substantial part of the burden of conflict regulation within the political system.


Ironically, the heavy focus on elections that captured the attention of policymakers and scholars who studied international state building did not produce much research on political parties. Still missing from this work on post-conflict democratic state building are focused studies of the development of political parties and party systems and their role in establishing and stabilizing democratic political systems. The importance of party development to successful democratization more generally is well established in the literature, and research on third-wave democratization is rich with work on party development and its implications for the survival of democracy.16 “Strong and settled party systems,” Larry Diamond notes, “are conducive to political predictability, trust, and willingness to compromise,” all of which must underpin any successful democratization process.17 Over the last ten to fifteen years, an extensive literature has developed that encompasses institutionalist, sociological, and organizational approaches to understanding why and how political parties endure, adapt, or disappear in the face of changes in their environments.18 In addition, scholars of Latin America, Eastern and Central Europe, Africa, and the former Soviet Union have made significant contributions to the literature on the relationship between democracy and party or party system development.19 Before the 1990s, much of the literature on party politics tended to subject parties to overly simple assumptions about internal party dynamics, focusing their analyses on the impact of the electoral environment—socioeconomic or demographic changes, for instance, or electoral system or constitutional design. As recently as 2002, Serenella Sferza complained that “most approaches to political parties offer an externalist view of party development. Whether these approaches emphasize socio-structural or institutional determinants of party trajectory, or both, they cast political parties as passive takers of their environment.”20 Robert Harmel and Kenneth Janda complained that “most statements about party change have given little attention to the parties’ own decision-making processes in effecting organizational change.”21 Early rational choice approaches were particularly notable for their tendency to treat parties as unified political actors whose behavior could be satisfactorily understood with reference only to the incentive structure presented to them by external factors, most importantly the formal institutional framework. Rationalist and institutionalist approaches to the study of party politics soon evolved to admit of multiple goals, as in Müller and Strøm’s distinction among policy, office, and votes.22 The unified actor assumption was gradually relaxed and replaced with an appreciation of the distinctive strengths, resources, and incentive structures that accrued to different actors within political parties, such as party members elected to public office, regional party officials, or central-level party

Introduction 7

leaders.23 Concurrently, scholars of party politics began to turn toward more nuanced analysis of internal party dynamics as well as to the interaction of internal and external factors to explain the decisions of party leaders and the outcomes of those decisions.24 Yet the burgeoning literature on state building has virtually ignored the topic of how parties might develop or adapt to play the roles that state builders implicitly expect them to play. Despite the centrality of militarized political parties and armed opposition groups to postwar politics, there have been very few comparative studies that examine the political dynamics of transition from the point of view of the major parties involved.25 Most comparative studies of war-to-peace transitions view them from the perspective of peacekeepers and other international actors. Little is known about how armed opposition groups or militarized parties make the transition from battlefield to political arena, and what is known is not very encouraging. Recent work on the political economy of civil war, for example, suggests that the benefits of war and statelessness to belligerents, and the durability of wartime economic networks, pose significant challenges to well-intentioned political engineering in the postwar period.26 Scope and Purpose of the Book This book offers a comparative study of four armed opposition groups in three cases that are broadly considered as post-conflict success stories: Bosnia, El Salvador, and Mozambique. The parties examined here are the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in Bosnia, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador, and Renamo in Mozambique. The book focuses on the challenges posed to these parties by the transition to electoral politics and identifies patterns in the interaction of electoral politics and internal party dynamics that can help explain when and how electoralism helps to build parties committed to democratic politics, and when it does not. A better understanding of this process has implications that apply to a much broader set of democratizing countries than just the post-conflict cases. However, post-conflict cases— especially those in which the peace implementation process is internationally supervised—provide a setting in which the effects of electoralism on political parties are most likely to be visible, owing to greater certainty regarding the rules of the game and to the greater organizational coherence in these settings. A comparative study of Renamo, HDZ, SDS, and the FMLN suggests that whether electoralism in fact generates the kinds of deleterious effects Mansfield and Snyder and others predict, or whether it sets in motion the habituation


process described by Rustow, depends on the impact of electoralism on the major political parties in each case. This point has not yet been made in a systematic way in the literature. This book argues that political parties, as the mediators or filters of democratic transition, constitute a sort of “missing link” necessary for understanding how and why narrow electoralism sometimes promotes the establishment of democracy, and sometimes does not. The book maintains that participation in electoral politics over time has a strong tendency to create and reinforce constituencies within parties that have a stake in electoral politics. But in the internal battles of political parties bent on winning a share of political power, these constituencies do not always prevail. Whether or not they do depends on the interaction of internal and external challenges to party leaders, who are situated at the confluence of two political “games”— one aimed at maintaining their position within their party and the other aimed at competing successfully with other parties for political power.27 Actions taken to achieve the latter goal may weaken party leaders’ position vis à vis their internal rivals. Challenges from internal rivals may impede parties’ competitiveness against other parties. This two-level game is at the core of the dynamic process through which parties construct and carry out strategies of adaptation to, or rejection of, democratic politics, and it is the focus of this book. We seek a clearer understanding of when the dynamics of this two-level game lead parties to invest themselves in democratic politics, rather than to subvert them. For each of the four parties considered here, the book asks how participation in multiple elections over more than a decade has affected the commitment and strategy of former armed opposition groups with respect to the postwar political system. The case studies presented are rich but not extravagant in detail. The aim is theory building, not testing. For the four parties examined here, we map out two broadly different outcomes. The results suggest that the usual suspects—institutional design, historical legacies, degree of international intervention—fail to explain adequately the degree to which former armed opposition groups invest in electoralism. Careful process tracing in each of the cases allows us to isolate the intensity of interparty competition as a pivotal independent variable whose effects are then mediated by internal party factors. For Renamo and HDZ, interparty competition was less intense than for SDS or FMLN. This had to do with the fact that the electorate remained polarized around the wartime political cleavage in the first two cases, which minimized pressure on Renamo and HDZ to make changes in the way they appealed to their bases. There was little pressure to reexamine the party’s

Introduction 9

ideology or collective identity. For the leaders of both parties, the threats to their authority posed by full adaptation to electoral politics were considerable. In both cases, the leadership in place at the end of the war was ill suited for the new electoral politics, and its power base lay partly in its control of patronage and access to power. Participation in electoral politics diffused that power, as members of parliament and other elected officials began to gain their own bases of legitimacy and power within the party. At the same time, because of resource constraints in the case of Renamo and the extensive powers of the international community over HDZ’s internal party affairs, both parties lacked the ability to opt out of serious political contention. To do so would risk not only the chance to win political power, but also the loss of financial resources associated with public office, campaign subsidies from the government and/or donors, and credibility in the eyes of donors and investors who might support the party. Both parties dealt with this dilemma through a halting process of adaptation characterized by minimal investment in the new rules of the game. Wherever possible, each party’s leadership sought to relocate interparty political conflict from established political institutions (such as the legislature) to less structured, less formal negotiating venues. This permitted the leaders to fend off challenges from mid-level party leaders—particularly those in parliament or local elected office—who might otherwise have gained sufficient power to challenge them from within. In both cases, mid-level leaders eventually peeled off from the party to form their own parties, but to little effect. SDS and FMLN, by contrast, faced stiff competition in the electoral arena. Initially, the internal threats posed to these parties’ leaders by investing fully in the new political system were balanced first by threats to the party’s survival created by external competition and then by the gains to be realized once these parties began winning public office. Success in electoral competition, in turn, created a cohort within each party with a stake in democratic politics, which increased the pressure on existing leaders to adapt the party’s public identity and its internal decision-making structure in ways more suited to electoral success. The result, in both cases, was the development of strong constituencies within both parties for continued investment in democratic politics. However, while this constituency prevailed and consolidated its leadership of SDS, reformers were rebuffed by incumbents from the party’s rival orthodox tendency in the case of the FMLN. Successive reformist cohorts left the FMLN to form their own parties, and the rule changes they had achieved within the party were quickly reversed. Explaining this difference in outcomes


requires exploration of the way that the challenges of stiff interparty competition interacted with internal party politics. Why study these four parties? First, the post-conflict cases examined here are of considerable interest in themselves, as an important and varied set of post-insurgent parties that have made a relatively successful transition from battlefield to political arena. That transition has played an important role in the character of democratic transition in Bosnia, Mozambique, and El Salvador. Using original field research as well as secondary sources, this book provides new and significant material on these four parties and on how their adaptation processes have influenced the broader transition to democracy in each country. Second, the four post-conflict cases examined here provide particularly clear examples of the kinds of effects that electoral politics can have elsewhere when elections are integral in democratic state building. The effects of electoral participation on parties as organizations are likely to become visible only over a period of time (and with repeated elections), and they are most likely to manifest themselves where minimally coherent party organizations exist at the onset of elections. In these cases, we have the opportunity to examine the impact of at least ten years of postwar electoral politics over roughly the same period, from 1994–2006 in El Salvador and Mozambique, and from 1996–2006 in Bosnia. We also have four cases in which minimally coherent organizations existed at the onset of elections and in which party leaders were constrained in their ability to opt out of electoral politics. The rest of the book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 explores the role of parties in mediating democratic transitions. It examines common assumptions about the relationship between parties, elections, and democratic state building. It then scrutinizes these assumptions in the light of the experiences of “fourth wave” democratizers and post-conflict cases and proposes an alternate set of expectations about the role of parties in the development of electoral democracy. Finally, it sets out the analytic framework that will be used to explore the cases of Renamo (chapter 2), the Croatian Democratic Union and the Serbian Democratic Party (chapter 3), and the FMLN (chapter 4).28 Each of the three empirical chapters provides a brief history of the civil war and the transition from war to peace, as well as necessary background on the history of the armed opposition group or groups in each case. We then examine the multi-level game to which party leaders are subjected as they seek to adapt to electoral politics. We explore the pressures on party organizations generated by interparty competition, as well as the pressures generated by the need to adapt organizational routines and resources to life in the political arena. These chapters seek to identify patterns linking the organizational

Introduction 11

challenges parties face with the repertoires of response available to them and to explain parties’ strategic choices regarding how or whether to adapt these challenges in ways that entrench democratic institutions and processes, rather than undermine them. The concluding chapter of the book lays out the theoretical and practical implications that emerge from the structured, focused comparison of the four cases.


CHAPTER 1

Parties as Mediators of Political Change Introduction

I

n what sense do parties mediate democratic transition? How do they influence the relationship between electoralism and democracy? Parties can adapt to democratic rules and procedures, thereby reinforcing them and contributing to a process of institutionalization. Or, they can block the impact of democratic rule changes. This chapter argues that whether or not electoral politics leads to democracy depends in large part on the responses of political parties to the internal and external challenges of formal democratic politics. Elections set the stage on which politics, and political change, plays out. They affect the capacities, incentive structures, and strategic behavior of all kinds of key actors, including civil society organizations, media outlets, opinion makers, and politicians. But it is the interaction between elections and parties that is perhaps the most consequential for the shape of the political system. Electoralism puts parties in the driver’s seat. The very act of organizing elections depends on parties, who must recruit, groom, and socialize candidates for public office and monitor and regulate their behavior once in office. Parties socialize their followers, whether consciously or unconsciously, regarding the rules of the game and the circumstances under which those rules should or will be followed by the party. They are expected to formulate alternative government policy programs, or at least to offer a collective identity for their followers, which voters can use to try to gauge the priorities of the party were it to gain office. Moreover, parties are often in a position to shape and reshape the electoral rules and to influence the strategies of other actors (through persuasion, control of the rules, control of resources, etc.). The way the major parties decide to play the game will influence the way that other actors can play the game.


This chapter explores, first, assumptions about the relationship between parties, elections, and democratization that are often made by advocates of democratic state building. It then examines the wider comparative literature, asking whether these expectations are supported by the broad study of political parties and electoral politics. We find that the democratic state-building literature draws insufficiently on the existing democratization literature and that it is seriously undertheorized regarding the nature of political change. The chapter closes by offering a framework for analysis of how electoralism shapes parties and the implications for democratic state building. Claims for Democratic State Building State building is the construction of authoritative governing institutions that are sovereign within a defined territory. Since international involvement in state building became pervasive in the early 1990s, democratization has been the official cornerstone of post-conflict state building. Roland Paris notes that throughout the 1990s, internationally led state-building efforts “all pursued the same general strategy for promoting stable and lasting peace in warshattered societies: democratization and marketization.”1 What this has meant in practice is that electoralism—defined as the practice of holding regular, periodic elections—has become the starting point for post-conflict state building. It is assumed that electoralism will provide a foundation for durable democracy, or at a minimum, that electoralism itself will endure and offer a foundation for state building, even if it never blooms into anyone’s idea of full democracy. This assumption, and the problems inherent in it, will be examined momentarily. Why do state builders turn to democracy as the preferred basis for state reconstruction after civil war? Clearly, there are ideological and strategic reasons for this choice that have little to do with the actual utility of democracy as the basis for a stable postwar political settlement.2 However, the international actors who have been most engaged in post-conflict state building, as well as a number of prominent academics, have argued that democracy has intrinsic value for the construction of a durable peace and a viable state in the wake of civil war. Former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for example, was emphatic about the need for peace-building operations to be built around processes of democratization. He noted that “there is an obvious connection between democratic practices—such as the rule of law and transparency in decision making—and the achievement of true peace and security in any new and stable political order.” 3 He went further to specify that connection:

Parties as Mediators of Political Change 15 Because democratic governments are freely chosen by their citizens and held accountable through periodic and genuine elections and other mechanisms, they are more likely to promote and respect the rule of law, respect individual and minority rights, cope effectively with social conflict, absorb migrant populations and respond to the needs of marginalized groups. . . . Democracy within states thus fosters the evolution of the social contract upon which lasting peace can be built.4

As the U.S. Committee of the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe pointed out in 1998, in Bosnia “continuous elections, if held in as free and fair a manner as possible, have been viewed by the international community as a means to bring stability and recovery to a country divided by extremist nationalist leaders.”5 Advocates of U.S. intervention to depose Saddam Hussein in Iraq also argued the virtues of democratic state building.6 There is no shortage of critical perspectives, of course, and academic studies have tended to be far more cautious in proclaiming the virtues of democracy for state building and the construction of a framework for peace. For example, a 2006 special issue of the journal Democratization titled “Securing Democracy in Complex Environments” critically examines the practice of democratic state building.7 In another study, Karin von Hippel asks “whether or not democratization can resolve or overcome the underlying problems that generate many of the current civil conflicts.”8 Others, like Elizabeth M. Cousens and Chetan Kumar, take a more neutral stance on the democracy question, arguing that “the most effective means to self-enforcing peace is to cultivate political processes and institutions that can manage group conflict without violence but with authority and, eventually, legitimacy.”9 Surveying the literature, Michael Brown cites such factors as discriminatory political institutions and poor intergroup relations, and notes that while “closed, authoritarian systems are likely to generate considerable resentment over time . . . even in more democratic settings resentment can build if some groups are not adequately represented.”10 Yet, as with the World Bank’s debates on governance and economic development, many analyses tend to favor the core elements of democracy as essential factors for post-conflict peace building, even if they do not use the word democracy. Still others argue that the United States and other Western powers in fact have little interest in democratization per se and that this is at the root of the simplistic assumptions and blunt instruments that have been applied in too many post-conflict efforts at democratic state building. It is certainly true that democracy promotion has become a function of U.S. national security policy which, as Julia Buxton points out, “has led to the adoption of overly mechanistic and instrumentalist approaches to democracy building.”11


Nevertheless, this is not a reason to dismiss such efforts as unworthy of serious scholarly attention. Rather, the efforts to reconstruct “collapsed” or post-conflict states or to impose “regime change” on the basis of democratization, only highlight the importance of critical examination of such strategies. One problem with many of the pro-democracy arguments is that, while it may be true that having a functioning democracy has many advantages for state building, we simply know too little about what happens while democracy is being built. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Roland Paris, and others argue that the transition to democracy is a dangerous time for a fragile peace. But how then is democracy to be achieved, and what are the costs of attempting to achieve peace and regime change simultaneously? Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Such questions highlight a general problem with the literature on democratic state building: it is largely innocent of explicit theorizing about the problem of how political change occurs in these contexts. Thomas Carothers has argued, for example, that in late democratizers as well as in post-conflict cases, “democracy promoters . . . assumed that democracy building and state building would be mutually reinforcing endeavours or even two sides of the same coin.”12 In fact, he points out, the demands of democratization and state building often run in polar opposite directions: “Where state building from scratch has to be carried out, the core impulses and interests of power holders—such as locking in access to power and resources as quickly as possible—ran directly contrary to what democracy-building would have required.”13 In general, both practitioners and scholars have focused overwhelmingly on the role of external actors in promoting political change. As our cases demonstrate, however, the power of external actors tends to diminish the further one moves from the end of the war. The tension between means and ends in democratic state building is somewhat analogous to the issue that vexed the literature on structural adjustment in the 1980s. Are night-watchman states of the kind advocated by neoliberal economics the most effective instruments for bringing about a free-market economy with minimal state intervention, particularly where this involves invoking dramatic political, social, and economic changes? For our purposes, we need to explore the challenges of using multiparty politics, or electoralism, to bring about a durable, democratic state. Who, or what, are the agents of change? Are actors or institutions more decisive as mechanisms of change? How do we know how these mechanisms will behave once electoralism is established? What are the unforeseen consequences of electoralism in the short term that might prevent us from reaching the long term?

Parties as Mediators of Political Change 17

The failure to theorize political change satisfactorily has produced at least three serious weaknesses in intellectual and practical exercises in democratic state building. These are a failure to attend to the impact of structural factors such as historical legacies and socioeconomic factors; an over-reliance on institutional design as a solution to the challenges of democratic state building; and a failure to problematize the role of political parties in democratic transition. First, as Carothers and others have argued, the “transition paradigm” that has guided much of the advocacy for democracy promotion suggests that there are no preconditions for successful democratization: “All that seemed necessary was a decision by a country’s political elites to move toward democracy and an ability on the part of those elites to fend off the contrary actions of remaining antidemocratic forces.”14 Practical and scholarly advocacy for democracy promotion in “fourth wave” democratizers has proceeded on the assumption that because older analyses emphasizing “preconditions” have been called into question by events, it is safe to ignore the impact of structural conditions on the process of democratization after it is formally introduced.15 But this is not a safe assumption. Structural factors might do less than previously believed to explain why countries initiate democratization processes. However, there is no reason to believe they do not influence how those processes unfold. This problem is well understood in the broader comparative literature. Herbert Kitschelt’s comprehensive work on party development in Eastern and Central Europe after 1989, for example, reminds us of the dangers of voluntaristic approaches to political change: “Although regime breakdown may make some actors imagine an almost infinite range of choices among alternative new social and political orders, the former institutions and resource distributions, together with entrenched mutual expectations about likely or appropriate behavior generated under the old regime, still affect actors’ aspirations and practical moves when building a new order and thus circumscribe the feasible set of outcomes.”16 Michael Bratton and Nicholas van de Walle reach a similar conclusion in their study of democratic transition in subSaharan Africa. They argue that transition outcomes depend in large part on the nature of the pre-transition regime, and particularly on the degree of participation and contestation in the political system.17 Second, democracy promotion since 1990 has relied heavily on the design of appropriate institutions.18 This is not unrelated to the voluntaristic approach just described. While structural factors such as historical legacies and socioeconomic factors are beyond the control of state builders, institutional design is not. Careful institutional design has been envisaged as a way to ensure that elites’ preferences and actions conform with those expected to


be propitious for successful democratization. Institutional design has focused primarily on the construction of electoral systems and the configuration of the executive–legislative branch relationship. But as John M. Carey argues, “data on party-system fragmentation, proportionality, and majorities do not shed much light on the motivations of politicians, the types of public policies they value, and the ability of parties to act collectively in pursuit of partisan goals.”19 For this, we need a better understanding of parties from the inside. Moreover, the literature on institutional design has largely ignored political parties and viewed “party engineering” as infeasible. Benjamin Reilly notes that “political parties have typically been viewed as social phenomena beyond the scope of deliberate institutional design. . . . Because political parties in theory represent the political expressions of underlying societal cleavages, parties and party systems have not usually been thought amenable to overt social engineering.”20 He argues, however, that it is in fact possible to design electoral systems that will promote “broad-based, cross-regional, or multiethnic parties and party systems.”21 He explores the use of electoral mechanisms to combat polarization and conflict in a range of countries and proposes four strategies for what he dubs “party engineering.” One involves the intervention of external actors, which has had very limited success. A second is to increase control of parties from the top, allowing leaders to impose cohesion and party discipline. To expect that this will have positive effects for democratization and conflict mitigation of course assumes that the party leaders are interested in achieving those goals. Perhaps the greatest promise comes from electoral systems designed to require parties to draw cross-cleavage support to win elections. In other words, a party would have to garner support from regions, ethnic groups, or communities other than those that constitute its core base of support in order to win. The main problem with institutional design as a solution to the challenges of democratic state building, however, is that formal institutions do not immediately constitute a decisive influence on political actors’ behavior. As Douglass C. North reminds us, “although formal rules may change overnight as the result of political or judicial decisions, informal constraints embodied in customs, traditions, and codes of conduct are much more impervious to deliberate policies.”22 For example, Todd Eisenstadt finds that “in transitional regimes such as Mexico, where democratic institutions have yet to be consolidated, the behavior of political actors, such as opposition parties, is shaped more at the subnational level by environmental and structural factors than by the limits of formal institutions.”23 His careful empirical study demonstrates convincingly that formal institutions only begin to shape actors’ behavior in decisive ways with the passage of time and repeated use. He highlights “the primacy


of established patterns of bargaining (informal institutions) over formal new institutions, at least until opposition cost/benefit calculations show that vesting themselves in the formal institutions is worthwhile, a conclusion that can take years or even decades to reach.”24 Thus while institutional design is important, it fails to tell the whole story. The impact of institutional design can only be fully understood through an understanding of the context in which the institutions are situated, and through a clearer understanding of the political actors who view formal institutions as but one among a series of constraints that affect their calculations. A final weakness with institutionalist literature is that the question of how such institutions are created has not been sufficiently explored. Paris, echoing Samuel P. Huntington, is critical of democratic state-building approaches that produce liberalization before institutionalization. He advocates creating strong institutions capable of constructively channeling citizen participation and of managing conflict within the political system prior to unleashing participatory competitive politics. He suggests that state builders “postpone elections until moderate political parties have been created, and mechanisms to ensure compliance with the results of the election have been established.”25 Such prescriptions, however, leave unanswered the questions of how such institutions might be created in the absence of democratic politics. Who would be responsible for defining and establishing such institutions? Electoral systems are relatively easy to impose, though as noted earlier, they are not automatically obeyed. One widely used definition of institutionalization describes it as “the process by which a practice or organization becomes well established and widely known, if not universally accepted.”26 In an institutionalized party system, for example, “actors entertain clear and stable expectations about the behavior of other actors, and hence about the fundamental contours and rules of party competition and behavior.”27 How does a set of rules about political competition become well-established if not through use by political actors? How do actors achieve stable expectations and a clear understanding of how the system works if not by using the system, interacting with one another under those rules? North, Selznick, Hyden, and others have suggested that institutions develop over time through use.28 On the other hand, we know that repeated interaction under a given set of rules does not necessarily lead to a reinforcement of those rules. It may instead lead actors to try to change the rules.29 But we don’t know what actors will do unless we have better knowledge about the actors themselves. How can we assume that the incentives offered by newly created institutions will not be undercut or trumped by other incentives these actors face? As we discuss later, political actors’ strategies are also affected by their expectations about the staying power of existing institutions,


their ability to influence the rule-making process, or their ability to affect the degree to which the rules of the game are enforced.30 The third weakness in the theory and practice of democratic state building is the failure to understand the role of political parties in mediating the process of institutionalizing the new rules and procedures. As Giovanni Sartori has argued, “unless we come to grips with the anatomy of parties, our understanding of politics will always be handicapped by an important missing variable.”31 How and why do parties decide to adapt to, reinforce, undermine, or evade the new rules of the game? As argued earlier, parties are in a position to play a decisive role in determining whether rules get reinforced or undermined. Every election presents parties with such opportunities. There is a rich, empirically grounded literature on the transformation of the communist parties and the emergence of new parties in new democracies in Eastern Europe and parts of the former Soviet Union after 1989, as well as in Latin America and other regions.32 However, this literature is often overlooked when electoralism and democracy are discussed in the context of post-conflict state building. As Julia Buxton points out, “democracy promotion tends to avoid engagement with political parties, despite the crucial role they play in articulating and aggregating demands and their role as potential conflict drivers in polarized societies.”33 This raises, of course, a fundamental question—how should we conceive of political parties in new, post-conflict democracies, or in other new democracies for that matter? In the absence of critical empirical examination of parties’ roles in these contexts, assumptions are often drawn from the experience of established democracies. For example, Diamond argues that “political parties remain important if not essential instruments for representing political constituencies and interests, aggregating demands and preferences, recruiting and socializing new candidates for office, organizing the electoral competition for power, crafting policy alternatives, setting the policy-making agenda, forming effective governments, and integrating groups and individuals into the democratic process.”34 To perform these functions effectively, Diamond and others note, parties should have strong links to a social base, offer distinctive platforms that appeal to a core set of voters and that distinguish them clearly from other parties, and be able to attract and retain party activists and potential leaders. Huntington argues that a party “is strong to the extent that it has institutionalized mass support” and notes that a key aspect of party strength is “organizational complexity and depth, particularly as revealed by the linkages between the party and social-economic organizations such as labor unions and peasant associations.”35


Equally important as strong and capable parties are institutionalized party systems. According to Diamond, “institutionalized party systems thus increase democratic governability and legitimacy by facilitating legislative support for government policies; by channeling demands and conflicts through established procedures; by reducing the scope for populist demagogues to win power; and by making the democratic process more inclusive, accessible, representative, and effective.”36 Scott Mainwaring argues that institutionalized party systems are those in which the identity and behavior of political parties is stable; parties have strong roots in society, operationalized as linkages between organized interests and political parties; parties are consistent in their ideological positions; and major political actors see parties as “fundamental, necessary, and desirable institutions of democratic politics,” which have “firmly established structures, territorially comprehensive, well organized, clearly defined internal structures and procedures, own resources, [and have] procedures for selecting and changing party leadership.”37 An Alternative View of Parties, Electoralism, and Democracy It is widely agreed that neither parties nor party systems in most new democracies bear much resemblance to these descriptions. Considerable evidence suggests that in many of the world’s new democracies, not just in those emerging from civil war, parties are extremely weak, enjoy little popular legitimacy, and do precious little to stabilize the political system beyond serving as vehicles for the circulation of elites. For example, students of parties in eastern and central Europe have argued that parties tend to be organizationally weak and are often personalized around their leaders. Ingrid van Biezen and Peter Mair argue that this is a result both of the campaign environment (the type of party organization it takes to wage a successful election campaign) and of the fact that parties are not strongly rooted in social cleavages. Parties do not have strong roots in society in part because of the nature and rapidity of the transition from communist rule. Without strong social connections, “[r]ather than politicized social stratification, party formation was often based on politicized attitudinal differences, in particular regarding the desirability, degree, and direction of regime change.”38 Such parties are not offering alternative government programs, fostering broad popular support for democratic values, or creating conditions to boost political accountability. Much the same argument has been made about parties in sub-Saharan Africa where, as in post-communist Europe, elections signaled the beginning of the transition to democracy, rather than its culmination. In many new democracies in Africa and Latin America, political parties are largely inactive


between elections. As in eastern Europe, where parties emerged as a product of the transition to democracy, and not the other way around, “parties were not normally created as the representative agents of a pre-defined segment of society, [thus] the creation of a social basis for party politics was seen as something to be dealt with after the transition.” Consequently, “it is an electoral rather than a partisan linkage that shapes the relationships between parties and society.”39 Parties tend to be centrally controlled and oriented toward their funding sources—be that the state as in Katz and Mair’s cartel party model, or donors, who fund party development activities in a large number of African countries. Such parties “are much more likely to extract from [the formal institutions of government] the key resources necessary for their survival—money, status, and the powers of appointment and patronage. In this sense also, they ask much less of civil society.”40 Randall and Svasand note that “when measured against what is expected, explicitly or implicitly, of parties in the democratization literature, the performance of African parties has generally fallen well short and . . . indeed they have themselves sometimes been identified as ‘obstacles’ or ‘problems’ for the process.”41 The weakness of parties’ roots in civil society, the transience of their connections with voters in modern electoral arenas, and the availability of funding sources such as donors or the state all reduce the degree to which parties are likely to stabilize the system, socialize their followers, encourage and channel participation, or serve as vehicles for popular representation in ways conducive to democracy. What remains unclear is whether democratization today requires that parties play the same sorts of roles they played in west European democracies. For example, to what degree has the weakness of parties affected the quality of democracy in eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America? Toka argues that in Eastern and Central Europe, “the presence of well institutionalized political parties is not a must for democratic consolidation” and that “democracy is being consolidated before parties are being institutionalized.”42 Though many would disagree with the contention that democracy is necessarily being consolidated in these settings, it certainly seems clear that electoralism can thrive in the absence of “strong and settled parties.” Which of the “traditional” roles of parties, if any, are essential to successful democratization in contemporary efforts to move from electoralism to democracy? At what point in the process do particular roles become possible or necessary? A full exploration of these questions is beyond the scope of this book. However, if we begin with a fairly modest conception of what political parties are, we can empirically investigate the various roles parties may play in advancing or hindering the goal of making democracy the cornerstone of postconflict states. In particular, we are concerned with the impact of elections on


parties’ internal dynamics and with the impact of those internal dynamics on parties’ approaches to the political system. We therefore begin with an organizational approach to the study of parties. From this perspective, Joseph Schumpeter’s minimalist conception of parties and democracy is an appropriate starting point. For Schumpeter, democracy is about elite competition. He argues that “the democratic method [of producing a government] is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”43 The role of political parties is to structure this competitive process. “A party is a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power.”44 This definition of party is notable for what it does not say. Parties do not necessarily integrate state and society; they are not assumed to have deep roots in particular constituencies, nor do they necessarily aggregate and articulate citizen demands and preferences. Parties might not in fact moderate the demands of their followers. Instead, parties exist to allow individuals and groups of individuals to compete for political power. The behavior and characteristics of parties—their linkages to social bases, their degrees of institutionalization, the degrees to which they seek to aggregate and articulate the interests of voters—all depend on what it is that parties must do to compete successfully for political power. Schumpeter’s definition does not require us to assume a simple uniformity of party goals or impose assumptions about what party goals are, other than to compete for political power. It can also accommodate Wolfgang Müller and Kaare Strøm’s office-policy-votes formula.45 It allows us to trace the adaptations that party leaders make when challenged from within and by external actors and forces. In our organizational approach to party analysis, parties are “constellations of rival groups” whose relationship to one another is dynamic and responds to changes in external conditions.46 In their exploration of the concept of the “cartel party,” for instance, Richard Katz and Peter Mair usefully distinguish between the “party on the ground,” the “party in central office” (or party hierarchy), and the “party in public office,” and have argued that the “party in public office” has gained prominence due to changing incentives offered by the institutional framework, most importantly an increase in public financing of parties.47 In this perspective, parties can be “sliced” analytically into different sorts of groups—according to functional areas or “zones of uncertainty” (as Angelo Panebianco does), into regional groups, into ideological tendencies or factions. The decisions and actions of individuals within the party can be


analyzed in a rational choice framework. But individuals have a limited line of sight and lack control and information regarding the preferences and future behavior of others. Their interests and strategies are shaped by the party organization within which they are embedded. In each of the cases considered in this book, both the social polarization generated during the war and the lack of economic alternatives make the party a key avenue to socioeconomic success. This means that party survival and electoral success take on a level of importance to party leaders and militants that they might not have in other settings. Electoralism and Party Change With this conception of political party as a starting point, I argue that the potential value of elections to democracy, in cases where elections are the starting point of a democratization process, lies in the way that repeated elections set in motion dynamic processes within the political organizations that participate in them. In particular, they generate differentiation among groups within the party that have different responsibilities, and hence incentives, with respect to the political system. A number of scholars studying democratization in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe have pointed out the discursive struggle over the rules of electoral competition between ruling and opposition parties that often comes with the onset of interparty competition. These struggles affect the internal dynamics of both incumbent and opposition parties in ways that may lead to changes in these parties’ strategies and commitment to democratic politics, as well as to changes in the internal structure and power distribution within parties. As David Olson points out in a survey of party formation in new democracies of central Europe in 1998, “internal characteristics of political parties and their external relations in a party system may be expected to change through a sequence of elections and parliamentary terms, extending over a decade or more, in new democracies. The content of these changes, however, are not necessarily either clear or unidirectional.”48 For example, Andreas Schedler maintains that even flawed elections can produce positive effects for democratization because they create a nested game in which opposition and ruling parties use electoral competition as the occasion to parry with one another over the rules of political competition. “Opposition parties,” he notes, “usually do not accept flawed elections as the endpoint of democratization. Rather, they take them to be a mere way-station on the long road toward genuine electoral democracy. Manipulated elections accordingly tend to trigger cycles of conflict that revolve around issues


of electoral governance. Rather than becoming institutionalized they set countries on paths of democratization by elections.”49 Electoral reform and electoral competition, Schedler argues, “unfold simultaneously and interact in ‘nested’ two-level games.”50 Both opposition parties and incumbents treat early and often imperfect elections as necessary to the realization of their longer term goals. Neither sees them as the culmination of democratization. Opposition parties believe that even flawed elections provide them with opportunities to push for electoral reforms that will make the next elections better and improve their chances of winning. Incumbents hope that imperfect elections will placate donors and opposition parties without endangering their grip on power. Thus each election also sets in motion a parallel struggle over the rules of electoral competition, with incumbents hoping to limit or reverse movement toward genuinely free and fair elections, and opposition parties pushing in the opposite direction. Schedler argues that the pressures created by this two-level game are likely to create divisions within political parties. “Since actors may differ in their tolerance as well as in their strategic management of electoral ambivalence, each of the critical decision points in the electoral cycle may introduce tensions that lead to splits and provoke the emergence of ‘the classic four-player game of transition.’”51 Lucy Creevey, Paul Ngomo, and Richard Vengroff, in their comparison of party politics and democratization in Benin and Senegal, offer a concrete example of how repeated flawed elections contributed to a process of electoral reform and eventual defeat for the ruling party. They point out that “in Senegal, an evolutionary process of electoral reform, party change and shifting coalitions led eventually to the defeat of the dominant ruling party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), and turnover in government.”52 They argue that Senegal’s progress toward democratic consolidation can be explained in part by a series of electoral reforms, emerging, just as Schedler suggests, from successive rounds of electoral contests. “The fragmented opposition parties accepted these rule changes because they provided strategic opportunities not only for access and representation, but also for eroding the power of the hegemonic party and wresting control of the presidency.”53 The key role that parties played in Senegal was in pushing for electoral reforms that would eventually change the balance of power between the two major parties to the point where the opposition was able to defeat the longtime incumbents. Thus, parties’ responses to electoral victory or defeat are likely to have cumulative consequences over time for the dynamics of interparty competition. The same could be said of intraparty competition. In Mexico for example, protracted, iterative bargaining between incumbents and opposition led to an internal rupture within the ruling party.


Eisenstadt finds that elections in that country were marked for decades by post-electoral bargaining between the ruling PRI (Party of the Institutional Revolution) and opposition parties regarding the latter’s participation in the state administration. Imperfect elections provided an arena for opposition parties to demand concessions, both substantive and procedural, from the ruling party for next time around. Eventually, this strategy contributed to a decisive break within PRI which allowed opposition parties to gain the upper hand. “The PRI-state’s eagerness to trade posts for PAN [Party of National Action] cooperation, and local PRI electoral activists’ poor reactions to being ‘sold out’ by their national leaders, was the biggest catalyst of the rupture between the PRI and the Mexican state, culminating in electoral defeat [for PRI in 2000].”54 “Participants in a new democracy,” Olson argues, “learn through ‘system time,’ over a series of elections and parliamentary terms. They experiment and learn, through repetition, how to campaign effectively for votes. They also learn how to combine with and against each other to form governments and to decide policy in the ensuing parliamentary terms of office. This learning, in turn, creates the conditions for the next election.”55 In a sense, then, elections are constitutive of parties, just as they are constitutive of the other political institutions that make up a democratic political system. Each electoral process contributes to the building of political parties and other institutions. Each election provides opportunities and challenges, the responses to which will be decisive in determining the character and strength of actors and institutions that make up the political system. This is true not only in new democracies, but in all democracies. Elections provide actors within political parties with new choices and incentive structures—each election in a democracy presents political actors with key strategic choices, the most important of which is whether or not to play by the newly established democratic rules. Elections force actors to make important choices regarding electoral coalitions, resource management, target constituencies, and policy stances, among other things. The challenges are magnified in parties making the transition from armed opposition groups, as they must reorient internal authority structures, find new sources of funding, revise messages designed to attract followers, and so on. Beyond the impact of these decisions on the outcome of elections, the choices actors make in electoral periods may affect their very survival as political actors. As parties participate in elections, they learn how to structure and manipulate the rules to win the contest. This leads parties to shape political cleavages, rather than simply capturing or reflecting existing societal cleavages. It may lead them to try to build strong roots in particular constituencies, and it may create a situation in which, to succeed, parties must offer effective


representation of these constituencies in the political process. But none of this is true at the outset. And where democratic institutions are weak, whether parties win or lose the election may, initially, have less to do with their ability to serve as a bridge between citizen and state than with their ability to marshal financial resources, control the agenda of debate, and shape the initial rules of the game. In other words, the kinds of functions we commonly ascribe to parties in democracies may well be the products of electoral competition, not its prerequisites. The prerequisite is minimal—that people form a party, as Schumpeter put it, “whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power.”56 What those members must do to prevail in that struggle will shape, over time, the character of the parties and party system, and will have implications for the consolidation of democracy. Do parties have to build strong links to civil society to win elections, or is it enough to hire a small group of professionals to manage a media campaign once every four to five years? To what extent do parties have to offer their followers a coherent, distinctive identity to prevail over the competition? What kinds of collective identities yield political dividends in that particular society? What are party leaders’ expectations regarding the stability of the rules of the game? Will parties decide they can most effectively meet their goal of competing successfully for power by following the rules, or by evading them? By strengthening the rules, or by manipulating them? To this set of calculations is added another, as parties are not unitary actors. Sartori reminds us that “in most countries party subdivisions are likely to exist, to be significant, and to affect the operational code of the party.”57 To gain power, party leaders must prevail not only over other parties, but also over rivals from within their own parties. What must be done to achieve the latter may undermine progress on the former goal, and vice versa. Parties’ repeated participation in elections—even flawed elections—has the potential to transform parties’ internal power dynamics in ways that favor party leaders who have a stake in increasing electoral success. The shift to electoral politics empowers new actors and challenges incumbent party authorities. Because electoral politics requires a different set of skills from those demanded during wartime, or from those demanded in one-party systems, electoral politics is likely to change a party’s sources of organizational power and authority. In competitive political regimes, there is a premium on winning elections. Those with close ties to key electoral constituencies may become more important than those with close ties to security forces, for example. Parties may also face internal division over the proper strategies to use in contesting elections. Each electoral period allows, indeed obligates, parties to make choices about the way it will represent itself to the public, about who it


will attempt to mobilize for support, and how it will do so. These periodic opportunities for strategic planning are likely to bring to the fore tensions between rival elites within the party, since much is riding on the selection of a successful strategy. To the degree that parties are successful in contesting elections, the challenges to party leaders multiply. Parliaments, municipal governments, and other political arenas within the system offer many resources to rivals of incumbent party leaders, including visibility, financial resources, and the ability to build a support base of their own. In addition, politicians competing for seats in parliament may have very different ideas about effective electoral strategy than those competing for a place in municipal government. Thus, contesting elections in multiple political arenas is likely to generate differences among party elites competing at various levels and increase the motives and opportunities for aspiring party leaders to challenge incumbents. Research from a variety of perspectives leads us to expect that parties, as both survival-oriented and goal-oriented entities, are adaptive organizations and will adjust over time to their electoral environment (even as they also, of course, play a role in shaping it).58 That is, they will restructure to face their new challenges more effectively. But these adjustments do not always lead in a democratic direction. Parties may respond to challenges from within by centralizing and personalizing power, by clipping the wings of the parliamentary bench or local party leaders or others who show a potential to challenge existing party leaders. Or, parties may strengthen their ability to respond to such challenges by broadening participation and improving transparency within the party, by establishing clear rules about decision making and the allocation of authority in the party. They may respond to electoral competition by seeking to broaden their appeal, or to narrow it. They may invest in changing themselves to compete more effectively, or invest in new ways of subverting the system. Thus we must ultimately address the question of when repeated participation in elections produces parties that are both capable of and committed to operating under the democratic rules of the game. Whether and how such challenges to incumbent party leaders emerge, whether they succeed in dislodging incumbents, and whether this upheaval leads parties to adapt to democratic politics, depend on a large number of factors. These can be broken down into characteristics of the environment and characteristics of the party. While these have been separated in the following section for analytical purposes, what is important is the dynamic interaction of external and internal challenges, as we discuss in detail in the chapters that follow.


The Challenges of Elections The comparative literature on party and party system development has seen a considerable expansion in theorizing about the modalities of party change, as has already been suggested in our discussion. This is most evident in analyses which treat parties as organizations whose goals include survival, as well as more substantive goals, and which are populated by rational actors. As noted in the introduction, up to the 1990s, the dominant approaches to understanding party change were “externalist” ones which “cast political parties as passive takers of their environment.”59 However, as Sferza points out, “environment-driven explanations of party performance are largely meaningless unless complemented by internalist ones which account for what a party makes of a given opportunity structure, or how it manages to reshape it to its own advantage.”60 Environment I argue here that organizational change is a function of a discursive process, in which external pressures generate disturbances in internal relationships within the party.61 If these disturbances can be effectively managed, party leaders keep their positions. If not, they may lose out to internal challengers. Conversely, internal pressures may force party leaders to make choices about electoral competition that make it impossible for them to win elections against other parties. This in turn is likely to generate further internal pressure to come up with a strategy that allows the organization to prevail in interparty competition. Whether these changes lead to adaptations that favor democratization or not is a separate question, as noted earlier. Whether or not elections can “create” democrats depends on a number of factors comprising environmental and party characteristics and, most importantly, on their dynamic interaction. The key environmental characteristics can be effectively captured under the concept of environmental complexity. For our purposes, the complexity of a party’s environment depends on the degree of competitiveness in the electoral environment; the existence of multiple electoral arenas; and the strength or predictability of the rules governing the political system. Environmental complexity is expected to increase the chances of internal upheaval within party organizations. “A complex environment, like an unstable one, maximizes uncertainty and increases internal organizational tension because there are many internal actors proposing their own political strategies for dealing with complexity. A simple environment involves low levels of environmental unpredictability.”62


Competitiveness One key aspect of complexity relates to the competitiveness of elections. Indeed, Panebianco defines environmental complexity largely in terms of electoral competitiveness, focusing on the number of direct competitors. Direct competitors are those parties that target the same voters for electoral support and thus constitute a threat to the party’s very identity. Panebianco notes that “the competitor’s attack on the party’s identity destabilizes the organization because it impairs its ability to distribute collective incentives and thus raises doubts about the leadership’s credibility (i.e., legitimacy). Environmental uncertainty due to complexity favors divisions and instability in the dominant coalition, providing ammunition to the internal minorities.” He goes on to argue that “complexity and instability of the electoral arena therefore produce divisions within the party.”63 Similarly, Robert Harmel and Kenneth Janda argue that “the most potent external stimuli are those which cause a party to reevaluate its effectiveness in meeting its primary goal, whether that be electoral success or something else.”64 These external shocks then “catalyze a process of change that reaches more broadly and cuts more deeply than can occur as the result of internal changes (such as changes in leadership and/or the dominant faction) alone.”65 Major organizational change thus occurs when an external crisis exposes the limitations of the organization’s existing leadership, and rivals for party leadership emerge who successfully claim to be better adapted to handling the challenge. Presumably, repeated electoral defeat could constitute such an external shock. “When a major party appears unable to compete successfully, that becomes a powerful stimulus for change.”66 Change is most likely when the goal that a party has defined as primary is threatened. Harmel and Janda note that “when a shock of this nature coincides with (and perhaps results in) changes in leadership and dominant faction(s), the circumstances are optimal for broad fundamental party change.”67 They go on to describe the types of shocks that would be most consequential for vote-maximizing parties (electoral failure or a pattern of such failures), policy or ideology maximizers (loss of a central issue) or office maximizers (the loss of an effective coalition partner). Successful competition in interparty elections is essential for a party’s organizational survival. Thus no leader who proves unable to adapt in ways that will further the goal of organizational survival will survive. Successful performance could mean maximizing votes, gaining some level of public office as a coalition partner, or gaining the power to influence policy and rule-making processes. It need not mean playing by the rules, or investing in more free and fair elections. It may instead mean investing in more effective means of cheating to guarantee a win, or more effective negotiating with the


winning party to guarantee a share in the spoils. Which of these strategies is rewarded with internal security (security at the head of the party) depends on a number of factors, including how stable and enforceable the rules of electoral competition are (or are perceived to be); the costs and benefits of cheating, and so on. At the same time, rulers are not entirely at the mercy of events, since they can also interpret these events. They can claim, for example, as Renamo has habitually done, that electoral loss was not due to their own poor leadership, but due to the fact that the system is biased against them. Following Harmel and Janda, I argue that party leaders will undertake change under two sets of circumstances: when such change is necessary to preserving their own power, and when it is necessary to achieve the party’s primary goal.68 The two are, of course, often interrelated. It is under these conditions that shifts in the distribution of power within political parties are most likely to occur, as different kinds and sources of financial resources, popular support bases, and skill sets become relatively more important. The idea that external stimuli or “shocks” are often triggers for adaptive processes within parties is well established in the literature. What is less often discussed is the wide range of variation of such external stimuli. Though such shocks are usually described as single events of considerable magnitude, there is no reason they could not be cumulative.69 As we shall argue throughout the book, participating in elections at multiple levels in a competitive environment can chip away at party organization. Participation in electoral politics often presents a series of micro-shocks within party organizations. Individuals with certain kinds of skills are empowered, others find their authority and influence diminished. Cleavage lines within the party may shift, creating new intraparty alliances and rivalries. The literature also suggests that parties become more complex—more highly developed in organizational terms—when they face a more complex environment. Lack of political competition is likely to lead to slack party organization. Or, to put it another way, “highly competitive systems are likely to feature parties that are well organized to contest elections. Where one party consistently dominates, organization may be unnecessary for the victorious party and pointless for the others.”70 This resonates with findings from the organizational learning literature. Barbara Levitt and James March note that “powerful organizations, by virtue of their ability to ignore competition, will be less inclined to learn from experience and less competent at doing so.”71 Similarly, Panebianco suggests that party development is an inverse function of resource availability. “The more public resources available, the less the leaders’ need to highly institutionalize the organization . . . Easy availability of public resources [whether formally or informally] discourages strong organizational development, leaders are not interested in creating a party


bureaucracy, and selective incentives pass through other channels (e.g., governmental ones).”72 This offers support for one of the central hypotheses of this book—the more competitive the electoral arena, the greater the chances that elections will, over time, lead to adaptive behavior within parties. As Rustow predicted, politicians will perceive that a process of “natural selection” is at work which advantages those who adapt most effectively to the rules of the game. Multiple Electoral Arenas It is not only the competitiveness of any given electoral contest that counts. Holding regular elections at multiple territorial levels also multiplies the motives and opportunities for challenges from rival factions, particularly when elections at different levels are staggered rather than concurrent. This provides disgruntled party politicians time, motive, and opportunity to consider their alternatives and to split from the party to run on someone else’s ticket, or to press internally for party reforms that are likely to benefit them. Elections at any level put stress on political parties and are likely to constitute the type of external stimulus Harmel and Janda describe. Elections in multiple arenas multiply the demands on parties. Parties must now determine how, for example, performance in municipal government is going to affect their ability to get elected to national office. They must decide where to concentrate their financial and human resources—on municipal, legislative, or presidential elections. They must master nuts-and-bolts issues of governance—trash collection, public health, local development planning, and infrastructure maintenance—as well as excelling in a forum like the legislative assembly, where more abstract analytical and rhetorical skills are called for. One implication of municipal elections is that municipal office may become a launching pad for higher public office or for advancement within the party. Mayors have the duty or opportunity to attempt to resolve concrete problems. At the end of their term, if they have done their job well and been lucky, they can point to something their administrations are responsible for. Pointing to concrete achievements is something members of parliament cannot do as readily. So, where parties get hold of a significant city and do a good job with it, this can conceivably boost their national political profile considerably. On the other hand, it is also likely to ruffle feathers within the party. This of course has the potential to dislodge existing power-holders within the party, or to force them to adapt to new competition. Students of transitions from authoritarianism have pointed to the way that repeated electoral contests act to change the calculus of minority factions, or would-be rivals to incumbent party leaders. Writing on Mexico, Joy Langston notes, for example, that “the combination of electoral competition


and electoral reforms changes the incentives for minority factions to remain within the party.”73 She points out that “elections under fairer and more competitive conditions change the calculus of discipline for an individual politician. . . . An individual can compete under an opposition party banner and hope to win the elected post, especially for local executive races such as the gubernatorial and mayoral contests.”74 In Mexico, as in El Salvador (as we shall see later), local elections provided even greater opportunities, and motivations, for party dissidents to push hard for change within the party, or to defect entirely and run on another party’s ticket. “The local stage offered far more opportunities than the presidential race for disgruntled PRI politicians to split from the party.”75 This is consistent with Panebianco’s findings from Western European cases. “When the electoral arena is ‘turbulent’ i.e., is characterized by electoral fluidity and by serious shifts in party power relations, predictability is impaired and the dominant coalition is likely to have more difficulty keeping environmental uncertainty under control, and serious internal tensions.”76 Rule Stability A third key factor influencing the complexity of a party’s environment is rule stability, or the likelihood that rules will not change substantially over time, and that they will be rigorously enforced. Obviously, the expected stability and enforcement of the rules of the game will be a key factor in politicians’ calculations about whether to undertake the risks involved in changing the party’s internal order, adopting new strategies with respect to other political actors, or playing by the rules of electoral competition. The greater the uncertainty that parties face, either in the electoral or the parliamentary arena, the greater the likelihood for internal divisions within the party. And the greater the potential for internal divisions, the greater the chances that constituencies for democracy will act to recalibrate the balance of power within the organization. Also, the greater the uncertainty about the rules of the game, the less likely leaders will face the risks of organizational change to adapt to the rules. Donors may play a key role in this regard, by monitoring and funding electoral and other democratic processes and by withholding resources in response to violations of the rules. Greater certainty regarding the longevity of the rules of the game makes investing in those rules less risky to political actors. And if rival party leaders can cast the party’s task as that of competing successfully in elections, it makes leaders’ failure to adapt more costly.


Party Characteristics While it is important to understand the environment within which parties operate, this is only one element of the equation. The opportunities and motives for internal challenges will also vary in accordance with internal party characteristics. How electoral politics affects the internal balance of power depends on how human and financial resources were distributed throughout the organization at the end of the war. For post-conflict cases, there are a host of considerations that are addressed to varying degrees in the empirical chapters. Among these is the balance of power between military and civilian elements of the party at the end of the war. To what degree did power shift away from military leaders and toward those who negotiated the peace? Where did parties draw their first candidates—from the ranks of former military commanders or from new civilian recruits? There is no single recipe of party organization that is more conducive for stability or adaptation. “The relative advantages of specific forms of party organization . . . are not constant across institutional, social, and political contexts.”77 As Sferza shows in her study of the French Socialist Party, party leaders can and do adapt their internal structures in accordance with changes in their environment. However, this often occurs as the result of a struggle between contending visions of how the party ought to respond, rather than as the direct result of a decision taken autonomously by incumbent party leaders. Here Herbert Simon’s discussion of “problem representation” is relevant. Simon maintains that organizations are built around particular portrayals of the problems the organization is meant to solve. A change in problem representation, he argues, implies changes in organizational knowledge and in the relative value of different kinds of skills for the organization. This is one way to think about the problem of armed opposition groups moving into the political arena—as organizations, they face new challenges, and they are called on to solve different problems. This will shift power within the organization, and the problem representation itself will become the subject of competition—what should the organization’s goals be, how can it achieve them, and so on. Who prevails in this competition will depend on a number of factors. These include, most importantly, the resources, and particularly the patronage power, of the different groups; how well the vision being put forward resonates with those who hold power within the organization; and how well proponents are able to articulate their respective visions.78 A number of scholars writing on political parties have argued that the degree of institutionalization is an important factor in determining whether and how parties respond to challenges, whether from within or from the


environment. However, they disagree on the direction of the effects. For example, Panebianco, Harmel and Janda, and others argue that the more centralized and the more institutionalized a party, the less vulnerable it will be to internal challenges. Institutionalized parties, they argue, might be able to manage change with less risk to party incumbents, because mechanisms exist for making authoritative decisions, for enforcing these decisions and for punishing those who fail to comply with them. Panebianco argues that “the more institutionalized a party, the less disruptive the impact of environmental uncertainty: strong institutionalization reduces environmental uncertainty.”79 More institutionalized parties are better able to “control the electoral arena” because they are more effective at creating a committed, loyal base or even their own ‘political subculture,’ and stronger parties also are likely to discourage challenges by external competitors.80 Here, however, Panebianco conflates institutionalization—the degree to which rules and routines for decision making are stable, known, and well established—with having strong linkages to a social base. While the two might go together in some instances, with the demands of membership leading to greater routinization of party organization, or with party leaders bureaucratizing, à la Robert Michels, to protect their authority, this is not always the case.81 One can imagine an institutionalized party that does not have a stable voter base, as well as—perhaps more likely—a party with a stable voter base that does not institutionalize. Indeed, Renamo is a good example of the latter. In less institutionalized parties, by contrast, party leaders may be less able to predict how a given action will be received by various subgroups within the party. Moreover, a change in the sources of organizational power (a relative decline in importance of one environmental sector or in availability of a given external resource) could upset the balance of power among party subgroups. Without established mechanisms for recalibrating power, turnover could occur more easily. On the other hand, parties that do not have well-established rules and routines for making decisions and allocating authority within the party give party leaders considerable freedom to respond to external challenges without being accountable. Perhaps a more satisfactory way to think about institutionalization is to consider the relationship between institutionalization and autonomy. Does institutionalization give party leaders more or less autonomy from the party’s base, or from mid-level party cadres, for example? In some cases, more institutionalization may mean more autonomy, as party leaders cannot be easily “captured” by particular factions or interest groups within the party. In another sense, well-established rules and routines place constraints on party


leaders and shift power elsewhere in the party. In both cases, power can shift away from party leaders. The difference is that in highly institutionalized parties, it shifts in predictable ways, whereas in parties that are not institutionalized, such shifts may be unpredictable. These two circumstances demand different kinds of leadership skills, so that leaders who might be quite powerful in an institutionalized party would find themselves at sea in a more personalized party, and vice versa. Institutionalization is only the beginning however, as it tells us nothing about the distribution of power within a party, or the ways in which participation in repeated elections over time is likely to shift that distribution. “Given the degree of institutionalization, the ‘opportunity structure’ varies within each party, or rather the modalities and channels through which the internal political competition develops vary.”82 The degree of centralization, or control of the organization from the top, may also be important. An organization’s ability to weather internal challenges, according to Panebianco, can be partially predicted if we know something about its genetics and about its degree of institutionalization. Parties that were developed from the center outward by a small group of elites are less likely to be shaken by external challenges than parties that formed by “diffusion,” or through the amalgamation or agreement of multiple groups of elites to join forces to create a party. As a final note on the dynamics of party change, it should be emphasized that, while our focus is on party leaders, other actors within parties are also being affected by participation in elections, most importantly those individuals who aspire to be or to challenge incumbent party leaders. Though we can speak of party leaders’ responses, we must emphasize that party leaders’ responses are themselves conditioned by the circumstances they face within the party. Thus a similarly competitive or complex electoral environment will not provoke identical responses in all parties. Party leaders might consider the same sorts of responses, though they might not all be equally well positioned to implement them. And even if all did seek to implement the same set of responses, the outcomes might well be different, as party leaders’ responses were met with different reactions by party actors affected by them, and so on. This is why institutional analysis alone is inadequate. Certain institutional setups might predispose party leaders to similar responses. But from that point, we need to understand the kinds of constraints that exist on their decision sets and on their ability to implement those decisions. And for that we need more information on parties. Of central concern here is to identify how or whether the interaction of external and internal challenges creates an internal constituency for more


democracy, and how that constituency’s life chances are affected by incumbent leaders’ responses (bearing in mind that the constituency could include the incumbents). The Menu of Party Responses The menu of possible responses by party leaders to the challenges elections pose covers a wide spectrum. In many cases there is no response. “Before parties respond to such incentives for reform, party leaders, acting within their parties, must perceive the changes in the political environment, recognize their significance for their parties, and succeed in implementing party reform.”83 Leaders frequently fail to perceive changes to their environment and/or to recognize their significance for their parties, let alone implement reforms. Tsebelis notes that “once political actors see that a political outcome is disadvantageous for them, they do not necessarily attempt to modify immediately existing political institutions. On the contrary, they continue working inside the same institutional framework, hoping that on the next occasion, outside conditions will work to their advantage. Only after a series of failures is a political institution likely to become disputed.”84 Thus even though leaders may recognize that internal party organization is less than optimal for winning elections, or that electoral legislation is unfavorable to them, efforts to change things will likely be slow to start and even slower to finish. Levitt and March point out that organizational learning is made more complex by “the simultaneously adapting behavior of other organizations, and by an endogenously changing environment.”85 The range of variables that could be at the root of changes in party performance may appear overwhelming to party leaders, leading them to take inappropriate action or to take no action at all. Party leaders have a variety of strategic options to choose from, should they decide to undertake change. One option is initiating changes in internal party governance. Another is to change the way the party interacts with the formal institutions of the system or with other parties. Parties may seek institutional change—by pushing for electoral reform, for greater civil liberties or better administration in the next elections, etc. Or they may switch alliance partners or consider ways to enlarge their voter base, by changing the party’s collective identity. For our purposes, the menu of party responses can be broken down into three broad categories. This is not meant to exhaust the possibilities, but simply to identify broad groups of responses that are likely to be significant for party adaptation to electoralism. The first type of change is internal to the


party, and involves changes in internal decision-making procedures, primarily those related to electoral competition. Two important examples are changes in procedures for internal recruitment and promotion of activists, and changes in procedures for selecting the party’s candidates for public office. Candidate selection procedures are among the most visible and perhaps consequential changes for the distribution of power within the party. In the words of Reuven Hazan and Gideon Rahat, “beyond being a significant stage in the recruitment process, candidate selection is also an important arena for internal party power struggles.”86 As Austin Ranney argues, “the most vital and hotly contested factional disputes in any party are the struggles that take place over the choice of its candidates; for what is at stake in such a struggle, as the opposing sides well know, is nothing less than control of the core of what the party stands for and does.”87 Thus candidate selection is key to the distribution of power within parties. Changes in selection procedures are also easily observed by students of parties, and they are relatively easy for parties to do, despite their potentially major consequences. Changes in candidate selection procedures are, in essence, about changes in the distribution of power. Greater participation in the candidate selection process changes “the differential structure of rewards” to actors within the party. For example, when candidate selection procedures are opened to competition, current powerholders are vulnerable to challenge by the preferred candidates of the rank and file or by powerful factional rivals. Leaders find it more difficult to use candidacy for public office as a form of patronage in exchange for the loyalty and effort of party activists. Candidate selection procedures also determine to whom the party’s representatives in public office feel responsible. Perhaps loyalty falls to a handful of party leaders or to particular factions of activists or mid-level leaders within the party or to particular sectors of the general voting population or party membership. The larger and more diversified the party’s internal ‘selectorate’—that is, the more aspiring candidates for public office must satisfy the demands of multiple constituencies to be nominated to candidacy—the more party cohesion decreases. “Facing the plurality of pressures that characterize the more inclusive selectorates, the cohesion of the parties is likely to decrease, as parliamentarians behave more like individuals than team players.”88 Similar considerations apply to the recruitment and promotion of activists. What sorts of factors determine one’s “career trajectory” within the party? Do these tend to change as the party copes with the challenges of repeated elections? Changes in recruitment and promotion of activists could, like


candidate selection, indicate shifts in the sources of organizational power. In addition, the elaboration of formal procedures for either where none existed before could signal progress toward institutionalization of the party. A second broad set of responses comprises changes in the way the party seeks support from the broader population. Party identity changes are the most dramatic. Though this is the least likely sort of change, it is also the one that observers of post-conflict politics or democratization processes most often lean on to provide evidence of change. In Bosnia, for example, international authorities consistently exhorted politicians and voters alike to focus on economic issues in campaign platforms, rather than on appeals to ethnonational solidarity. Short of this, party leaders may also respond to external challenges by changing their coalition behavior (forming coalitions when they had not before, breaking coalitions, seeking new coalition partners). They might also reassess who their main rivals are and how to deal with those rivals (“nonaggression pacts,” flanking, mergers, etc.). The nature of the electoral system will, obviously, affect the range of choices parties have in this regard. Frank Wilson argues that, when party leaders recognize the need to change in response to some challenge, they are most likely to try small changes first, such as changing campaign tactics rather than changing party platform or reaching out to a new electoral base. “Programs and party doctrine are laden with symbolic values that make their modification costly in terms of both the length of internal party debates and the likelihood of offending party loyalists and activists by upsetting the delicate balance of the previous doctrinal or programmatic statement.”89 Even for more institutionalized parties, opting for change in the party’s identity could provoke a challenge from internal rivals as well as alienate existing supporters of the party on voting day. This is perhaps why the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in Bosnia first moved to change candidate selection procedures, then instituted recruitment and promotion procedures that served to eliminate many of the most hard-line nationalist activists from eligibility for party office or candidacy for public office. Only then did leaders turn toward modification of party statutes to make formal changes in the party’s identity, though in practice little changed. The third type of change concerns party behavior towards formal democratic institutions. Here we can examine whether the party regularly participates in elections, how it tends to react to the results, whether it pursues electoral reform in response, whether it seeks to strengthen or undermine the rules of the game, whether it seeks to embrace other political actors like civil society groups who could help leverage support for the system, or whether it makes recourse to its coercive power, or its power to bring supporters into the


streets, to undermine the formal system. Does participation in repeated elections increase or decrease party leaders’ propensity to use formal institutions, such as the courts, for resolving electoral disputes? Does it induce parties to embark on electoral reform, or to seek changes in the ways parties can be financed (increase state funding), or to advocate greater civil liberties in the interest of increasing their own electoral chances? It should be emphasized that changes in any one of the three areas listed earlier, from candidate selection, to changes in the party’s collective identity, to investments in strengthening the rules of democratic competition, have implications for the party’s survival as an organization and for the incumbent party leaders’ survival chances. While changes in candidate selection procedures may be made by leaders in an effort to thwart an emerging party constituency for greater investment in electoral politics, the outcome may be different from what leaders intended. Similarly, an attempt to expand the voter base may set in motion changes that are beyond the control of the incumbent party leaders, as may an embrace of local elections. Conclusion This chapter provides a foundation for understanding how parties mediate the relationship between electoralism and democracy. Simply put, the argument is as follows. Parties are organizations created to compete for political power. In a formally democratic system, they do so through regular, periodic elections. Elections present party leaders with a number of challenges and opportunities, and their responses help define the direction and scope of party development. We assume that, faced with the risks and gains generated by participation in repeated elections, party leaders perform a series of costbenefit analyses aimed at balancing two goals—maintaining their position in the party leadership, and prevailing over other parties in elections. These goals are influenced by “games” played out in two different, but mutually influential arenas—one is internal party politics, the other the electoral arena. Parties’ leaders will take on the risks entailed to their authority by organizational change only if not doing so jeopardizes their own authority at the head of the party, and/or threatens the party’s survival or ability to realize its primary goal. As we have seen in this chapter, the comparative literature on political party development offers a basis for a number of hypotheses about how parties are likely to be affected by participation in electoral participation and how this, in turn, affects the chances that democratic rules and procedures will become more institutionalized or less so. Parties that face more complex environments—especially stiff interparty competition—face greater pressure from internal constituencies for greater


investment in electoral politics. What “greater investment” means will be different for each party. For some, it might mean searching out an expanded voter base, while for others it might simply mean devising more effective mechanisms for candidate selection or better campaign strategies. The more successful parties are at getting their candidates elected, the more the potential for such internal challenges to the party leadership increase. Multiple electoral arenas also have a multiplier effect. Parties’ internal characteristics are also important. They help determine how a party must change to become more competitive, as well as the relative price of such changes. There is broad agreement that the degree to which a party is institutionalized matters, but there is less agreement about whether more institutionalized parties are more or less likely to be able to respond to external shocks effectively. Most importantly, however, it is the dynamic interaction between internal and external challenges that shapes parties’ responses and the implications of those responses for democracy and for the construction of a durable postconflict state. For as our cases make clear, all good things do not necessarily go together. Entrenched electoral democracy does not necessarily provide a foundation for a durable state. By the same token, successful state building has occurred in cases where genuine support by the dominant political actors for democracy lags behind.

Figure 2.1 Country Map of the Republic of Mozambique

CHAPTER 2

Mozambique: Electoral Politics and the Underdevelopment of Renamo Introduction

I

n October 1992, Mozambique’s ruling Frelimo party and the armed opposition group Renamo signed the General Peace Accord (GPA), which ended sixteen years of civil war in that country. The agreement provided for the inclusion of Renamo as a legal political party with full rights to participate in multiparty elections, then scheduled for 1993. The first elections were put off until October 1994 as the two former belligerents labored to fulfill the terms of the mutually agreed transition. This chapter traces the effects of that transition and subsequent electoral contests on the organizational development of Renamo as a political party, beginning in 1992 and concluding in mid-2007. The case of Renamo combines a relatively small degree of environmental complexity with low levels of organizational development at the onset of democratic transition. The result over three elections was minimal organizational development for Renamo as a political party. A relatively unchallenging electoral environment minimized the incidence of challenges from within. The absence of local elected politics, at least early on, together with the personalized, centralized nature of authority within the party, further diminished the likelihood that elections would provoke internal challenges. Renamo’s leadership was easily able to resist the few internal challenges that did arise. Over time, however, Renamo’s environment began to change. Frelimo used its incumbency to make incursions into Renamo’s electorate, delivering economic development and patronage that Renamo could not. As the war receded into memory, the ruling party became less cautious about exercising its political muscle, and Frelimo succeeded in using its legislative majority to change the electoral rules in ways not favorable to Renamo. Interestingly, as


Frelimo’s strength increased, Renamo began to serve as a pole of attraction to a new cohort of political activists who sought a viable alternative to Frelimo. This group perceived Renamo’s organizational weakness as an opportunity. Whether it will succeed in using what it perhaps perceives as the “empty vessel” of Renamo to launch a more capable opposition to Frelimo, however, remains to be seen. Renamo began its existence as an armed opposition group, with no previous existence as a political organization. Thus it came to the political arena in 1992 led by individuals with no experience in government or democratic politics, and with a high degree of distrust in the government and in its own ability to succeed under the new political dispensation. It faced a polarized political environment in which only two parties really mattered: Renamo and the ruling Frelimo party. Over the course of three general elections, Renamo has established itself as a serious electoral contender, and its leadership has clearly cast the party’s lot into the electoral arena. The party has never renounced the principle of electoral competition and has never withdrawn from the electoral process as a whole, though Renamo leaders have routinely sought to improve on disappointing electoral outcomes after the fact—for example by accusing the government of fraud, staging protests or backroom negotiations with the ruling party, and even announcing electoral boycotts. Despite repeated failure to win either the presidency or a majority in the legislature, with each passing election the party has sought to improve its ability to monitor polling, to campaign more effectively, and to reform electoral administration for the next time. Over time, the party has shown an increasing willingness and capacity to use established mechanisms, such as the courts, to adjudicate electoral disputes.1 Renamo has also sustained a core constituency, relying on the continuing appeal of political cleavages generated during the war. At the same time, there has been essentially no investment in organizational development. Authority within the party has remained highly centralized and personalized in the party’s president and wartime leader, Afonso Dhlakama. Authoritative decision-making structures exist mainly on paper. The most important decisions are made either by Dhlakama alone with a few advisers or by ad hoc committees cobbled together to create a semblance of legitimacy. Those close to Dhlakama who are perceived to have gained too much visibility or clout within the organization have frequently been demoted or dismissed. The party’s most visible contingent and only foothold in governance, its legislative delegation, has been unable to operate with significant autonomy on decisions of any importance. On major issues, the party has simply boycotted debates or votes in parliament, and Dhlakama has sought to take up these issues through direct negotiations with the government.2

Mozambique 45

Soon after the 1999 general elections, Renamo experienced its first significant public division, when Dhlakama’s former military chief of staff and parliamentary bench leader Raul Domingos was expelled from Renamo, allegedly for collaborating with Frelimo. He formed his own party, taking a number of high-level deputies with him, and ran against Dhlakama for the presidency in 2004. The Context of Electoral Competition in Mozambique Historical Overview A clear understanding of Renamo’s pattern of behavior requires a brief explanation of the political and institutional context in postwar Mozambique. A combination of conscious institutional design of Mozambique’s post-1992 political system and the historical relationship between Renamo and Frelimo tend to structure the behavior of key contemporary political actors and influence the outcomes of their decisions. Mozambique won independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975 after a protracted armed liberation struggle led by Frelimo. Roughly two years after taking power, Frelimo faced an armed insurgency of its own, one backed by powerful external allies. Fighting first broke out between the army of the newly independent government and a small group of armed individuals organized with help from Rhodesian security forces, who at that time were engaged in their own war with national liberation forces in what was to become Zimbabwe. In the early 1980s, what was to become Renamo was picked up by a new patron, the South African military intelligence services, who sought to use the group to destabilize neighboring Mozambique. While Renamo received substantial outside support, it soon began to capitalize on existing grievances within Mozambique. Foremost among these were a sense of ethnic and regional domination (by southern groups against the center and center-north) and heavy-handed attempts by the new Frelimo government to dismantle existing social and economic relations in the countryside. Examples of the latter include the suppression of religious and traditional authorities and the creation of communal villages.3 The war in Mozambique produced an estimated one million deaths and many more refugees and internally displaced persons, one of the world’s biggest land mine challenges, and the destruction of major roads, rail lines, bridges, and other economic and social infrastructure. The conflict was characterized by the routine use of violence against civilian populations, systematic use of terror meant to bolster relatively weak military capacities, the


widespread use of child soldiers and forced labor, and the establishment of economies of pillage. Renamo has often been characterized as an apolitical organization created by external forces, but that does not tell the full story. Renamo was created out of two conditions. First was the desire of powerful external actors, namely Rhodesia and South Africa, to create and maintain a force that could keep the Mozambican government off balance and prevent it from giving shelter to insurgency movements that presented a threat to these actors. Second was the dissatisfaction of a broad range of ordinary citizens who were disproportionately concentrated in the central provinces of Sofala, Manica, Zambezia, and Nampula. Despite its origins as a tool of white-ruled regimes in southern Africa for the destabilization of Mozambique, Renamo proved quite successful at identifying local grievances and incorporating them into its own storyline, which it then used, with varying degrees of success, to justify its actions to local populations. The range of local grievances upon which Renamo played ran the gamut from travel restrictions, to the creation of communal villages, to Frelimo restrictions on religion or on the authority of traditional leaders, just to name a few.4 Renamo’s extensive use of terror and violence against civilians in pursuit of its aims tended to reinforce early assertions that the group had no longer term political purpose or that it was merely the puppet of Mozambique’s enemies. Without a doubt, Renamo was an opportunistic organization that adapted its tactics to the moment. However, there were important regional differences in the nature of the war and in the use of local custom and belief to further military aims. Margaret Hall and Tom Young note, for example, that “the argument that the violence directed against civilians was indeed purposeful and instrumental was supported by an apparent lessening of such activity in areas where the local Frelimo influence and presence had been eliminated and where Renamo was relatively well established.”5 In the south, cultural references were invoked to increase the terror, while in the central provinces they were used to buttress far less coercive control and extraction from civilian populations. And while violence against civilians was common throughout Mozambique, indeed more common than engagements between the putative military forces, the most horrific and well-known massacres of civilians occurred in the southern region, notably in Homoine and Manjacaze. While there is much evidence that points to a “scorched earth” policy in southern Mozambique, throughout central and northern Mozambique Renamo was frequently seen by the local population as the more palatable of the two forces. And, as Finnegan and others have pointed out, there were marked distinctions between Renamo as a military force and Renamo as an occupying force.6 These distinctions in Renamo’s behavior

Mozambique 47

during wartime would find echoes in electoral politics, in which the core of the party’s support drew consistently from Mozambique’s five central provinces (Manica, Sofala, Nampula, Zambezia, and Tete). In October 1992, the government and Renamo signed the General Peace Accord in Rome. The peace talks had been hosted and mediated by the Italian government and additionally facilitated by the Roman Catholic lay community of Sant’Egidio. They were observed by Mozambique’s major donors, including the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, and Germany. The agreement consisted of seven protocols designed to address both the formal resolution of Mozambique’s civil war and the establishment of a competitive multiparty democracy along majoritarian lines, though parliament was to be elected under a system of proportional representation. The peace agreement called for the dismantling of Renamo’s armed forces and the integration of some of its troops into a new, unified national army; the reform or disbandment of various government security forces and restructuring of the police force; the reintegration of Renamo-held territory into a unified state administration; and the holding of the country’s first multiparty elections. The agreement was overseen and supported by the 6,800-strong UN Operation in Mozambique (UNOMOZ), with substantial participation by Mozambique’s key donor countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal, Italy, France, and Germany. This included 300 military observers and 5,500 troops to monitor and verify the ceasefire, demobilize and disarm troops from both the government and RENAMO armies, and provide security for the transition process. The peace process culminated in the country’s first multiparty general elections, held in October 1994. Presidential and legislative elections were subsequently held in 1999 and 2004. Two sets of municipal elections were held, in 1998 and 2003. At the time of its formal entry into the political arena, Renamo had the following characteristics. First, power within the organization was highly centralized and personalized in the party’s leader and presidential candidate, Afonso Dhlakama. Authoritative formal decision-making structures existed on paper only—in practice all major decisions, and many minor ones, were made personally by Dhlakama. Second, it was important to Dhlakama that he and his party be taken seriously as legitimate political contenders in democratic Mozambique. A major sticking point early on in the peace talks was Renamo’s insistence that it be recognized as a political party, able to contest power in the electoral arena. The Mozambican government rebuffed this demand, arguing that Renamo was nothing but a loosely organized group of armed bandits bent on total destruction and without political legitimacy or popular support. The government’s initial approach had been to offer to integrate Renamo members, as


individuals, into Mozambican society, without recognizing Renamo as a political party or as an entity of any kind other than a group of South African-run armed bandits. After several more rounds of negotiations, the government relented, recognizing Renamo’s right to exist as a political party. Renamo, in turn, agreed to respect the existing government, laws, and institutions, essentially recognizing the Frelimo government as legitimate. Dhlakama had engaged the services of foreign advisers to help him present a statesmanlike image in the eyes of both the international community and of Mozambican voters.7 He had also relied on foreign advisers and consultants to draft the party’s manifesto and constitutional reform agenda.8 Dhlakama’s desire to gain legitimacy as a political player gave the international community considerable leverage in helping to keep the party’s transformation on track. Further reinforcing this leverage were the financial strictures under which the organization labored. While Renamo had been generously supported for a time during the war by its external backers, resources necessary for transforming into a peacetime political organization were scarce, and the costs were considerable. Renamo had been “living off the land” during the war— extracting food, labor, and material support from local populations who, in the last years of the war, were increasingly strained by the drought. Becoming a functional political organization meant moving into the cities, where it was necessary to rent housing and office space and acquire vehicles, faxes, phones, and office supplies. At Renamo’s insistence, international bilateral donors and the UN stepped in to provide generous financial support for the transition. This had the effect of giving the international community a considerable direct stake in the transformation process and reinforced Dhlakama’s confidence in the process. At the same time, the absence of alternative resources constrained Renamo’s behavior, keeping them from abandoning the peace process altogether. Finally, Renamo’s small core of political and administrative cadres was insufficient for the number of positions the party was required to fill as part of the peace process, let alone a full candidate slate for legislative elections. The party needed a minimum of forty-five people to staff all of the peace commissions. For the most sensitive positions, Renamo relied on high level leaders who had been “in the bush” during the war. Renamo was also obliged to recruit a number of new members to represent the party on the peace commissions as well as to run as legislative candidates, and this presented its own problems. Chief among these was Renamo’s fear that its new representatives could be easily bought by Frelimo.9 Thus the major obstacles to transformation at the outset were organizational and financial. The transition to electoral politics threatened to shift

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organizational power away from those who had proven their loyalty and dedication to the organization during wartime and toward those who possessed the skills to serve as members of parliament and in other elected positions. The success of Renamo’s initial transformation from rebel movement to political party was due in large part to timely and persistent intervention by international donors and the UN during the political transition. Their involvement helped buoy Renamo’s confidence in the political transition and helped to constrain the behavior of both the government and Renamo. For though Renamo’s dependence on external support was glaring, the Mozambican government was also highly dependent on external support, with more than half of its budget funded by donors. In this early period, Renamo had little riding on its reputation for internal party democracy, and Dhlakama had no reason to believe that there was a significant connection between his party’s organizational development and its electoral fortunes. This was true for two reasons. First, key external actors had from the beginning conferred a kind of unconditional legitimacy on Renamo, as the only viable opposition party in a country where peace, external actors believed, rested on the success of opposition politics. The party’s $17 million transformation trust fund, paid for by international donors and administered by the UN, was the most obvious demonstration of this support, and there are numerous instances of donors intervening to shore up Renamo’s confidence in its ability to survive in the political arena.10 Influential donors like the United States, Italy, and Germany were in nearly constant contact with Dhlakama in the run-up to the 1994 elections, to allay his fears and keep the peace process on track. In addition, private individuals with an interest in seeing Renamo in power, primarily from Portugal and South Africa, provided funding and advice to Dhlakama. There were no external pressures from those quarters for Renamo to move toward more democratic or otherwise institutionalized party structures. While the intensity of this kind of involvement from international actors has diminished significantly, there is still little pressure for internal reform of Renamo from external actors.11 Second, as noted earlier, Renamo’s electoral constituency rested on a hard core of support in the center of the country, support built in part upon a shared sense of exclusion from political and economic power throughout the course of the war and beyond. This constituency was secure as long as Frelimo proved unable to deliver significant improvements in people’s daily lives. As time went on, the nature and relative importance of the challenges to Renamo as an organization began to shift. Resources remained an issue, but winning seats in parliament provided an important source of revenue for


the party. Renamo received a subsidy from the state based on its seat share in parliament, and the salaries received by individual deputies allowed an important group within the party to have a steady income at the state’s expense. Over time, the challenges presented by electoral politics came to be more of an issue. Between the first and second elections in 1994 and 1999, Renamo’s representatives in parliament gained considerable visibility, professional experience, and practical experience in the art of compromise and negotiation—rather too much, in the eyes of the party’s leadership outside of parliament. Dhlakama’s consistent reaction was to reduce Renamo’s capacity to be effective in the governance roles it had won (principally in parliament), and this produced further centralization and personalization of power within the party. Constitutional Framework and Party System Though formally denominated as a semipresidential system, the system of government established by the 1990 constitution was effectively a presidential one in which a directly elected president appoints a prime minister and full cabinet. The prime minister serves essentially as “head minister” in this system and is responsible to the president rather than to parliament. Parliament is elected according to a system of proportional representation, under closed party lists. The country is divided into eleven electoral circles, corresponding to the ten provinces plus the capital city of Maputo. Executive and legislative elections are held concurrently every five years. Municipal elections were held for the first time in 1998, and again in 2003. Until 2006, a party had to win at least 5 percent of total ballots cast for parliament nationwide to be awarded representation in the legislature. This represented a significant barrier for smaller parties to gain a place in national political institutions. As we discuss later, a number of smaller parties, together with Frelimo voiced calls for the repeal of this threshold, and in December 2006 it was eliminated by majority vote in the National Assembly.12 Renamo remained adamantly opposed to lowering the five-percent barrier for strategic reasons of its own. The fact that legislative elections are held simultaneously with presidential elections in practice ensures that Renamo’s leader will not be a member of parliament. While more than a dozen parties have competed in each of Mozambique’s three general elections (1994, 1999, 2004), the country has a two-party system, dominated by Frelimo and Renamo. For the 1999 and 2004 elections, Renamo ran for legislative seats in a coalition with ten other parties, known collectively as Renamo-Electoral Union (R-UE). However, Renamo was overwhelmingly dominant in this coalition. In 1999, 18 of the

Mozambique 51 Table 2.1 Presidential Election Results for Frelimo and Renamo, 1994–2004 % of presidential % of presidential % of presidential vote, 1994 vote, 1999 vote, 2004

Candidate

Joaquim Chissano (Frelimo) Armando Guebuza (Frelimo) Afonso Dhlakama (Renamo) Total vote won by Renamo and Frelimo candidates

53.3 — 33.7

52.3 — 47.7

— 63.7 31.7

87.0

100

95.4

Source: Mozambican National Elections Commission

Table 2.2 Legislative Election Results, Frelimo and Renamo, 1994–2004 Election year

Frelimo

Renamo

1994 1999 2004

129 (52%) 133 (53%) 160 (64%)

112 (45%) 117* (47%) 90* (36%)

Source: Mozambican National Elections Commission * Renamo-UE. UE members had 20 of the coalition’s 117 seats in 1999 and 5 of 90 in 2004. There are 250 seats in the Mozambican legislature

117 seats won by R-UE were allocated to UE parties, the rest were filled by Renamo deputies. In 2004, UE parties had five of the coalition’s ninety seats. As Carbone points out, “Renamo and Frelimo—as well as the competition between them—have deep seated historical origins and well-established regional roots. In this sense, the foundations of these two parties are more solid than those of many other African parties.”13 The rivalry between Renamo and Frelimo has brooked no significant defections from one party to another. A few figures have quietly left active party life within Frelimo, and several of Renamo’s more successful parliamentarians, including Renamo’s top peace negotiator in Rome and former chief of staff of its guerrilla army, Raul Domingos, have been expelled from the party under accusations of becoming too close to Frelimo. But before 2007, none of these former Renamo officials defected to Frelimo, nor had there been any aisle crossings between the two parties in parliament in fourteen years of postwar politics.14 International Actors Donor involvement has played a significant part in the unfolding of electoral politics in Mozambique and their part in the political context must be considered. Since 1992, donors have provided, on average, over 50 percent of the government’s annual budget.15 They have played a major role in providing


financial, technical and logistical support for elections in Mozambique. The donor community has also served as unofficial arbiter of electoral processes, whether in the capacity of official observer delegations, as holders of the purse strings, or as an unofficial “court of appeals” for Renamo complaints regarding the conduct and results of elections. In July 1995 for example, six months after the elections, Dhlakama wrote a letter to the ambassador of Spain, which was then chairing the European Union. In it he asked for systematic support for Renamo from the international community, in the form of development projects, payment of debts incurred during the election campaign, and support money to sustain day-to-day party operations: RENAMO is going through a very difficult period, as the international community knows. . . . RENAMO transformed itself, in a very short time, from a politico-military movement to a political party. It has no resources of its own with which to survive. It depends, during this crucial phase of its existence, on the indispensable support of the international community. Disquiet and discontent are stirring in the ranks of RENAMO, with some sectors feeling betrayed and questioning my authority. . . . The time could arrive when I, my authority weakened, will not have the power to avoid a catastrophe. Then, popular revolt, inevitable, will bring disastrous consequences for Mozambique, for the region, for the world. . . . Turning to the International Community is our only remaining recourse.16

In early 2007, Dhlakama announced that he would not boycott future elections or the National Elections Commission (CNE), though Renamo had unsuccessfully opposed major provisions in the new electoral legislation. Dhlakama characterized the passage of new electoral legislation as “dictatorship of the majority” and said that Frelimo’s insistence on the disputed points “shocked many people, including the international community itself [emphasis mine].”17 The extensive participation of donors in Mozambique’s democratization process has also contributed to increased certainty for political actors regarding the rules of the game. Political actors, opposition and incumbents alike, are well aware of the high degree of importance the country’s major donors attach to the holding of regular, reasonably free and fair elections in Mozambique. Because Mozambique has been regarded as one of the international community’s few sustained post-conflict success stories, donors have been assiduous in monitoring and intervening in the process of building the foundations for a democratic postwar political system in Mozambique. Moreover, the Mozambican state has long been touted as one of a handful of success stories for economic liberalization in Africa, and it has received considerable investment aimed at building state capacity.

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As a result, political actors have operated under a greater degree of certainty about the staying power of electoral politics than might otherwise be the case. Beginning in 1992, donors have consistently demonstrated their commitment to keeping electoral fraud or other blatant attempts to disregard the rules within certain parameters. This helped keep Renamo coming back to the table despite habitual electoral loss and despite the party’s dissatisfaction with electoral administration. International involvement did not make things perfect. But it did boost confidence and limit abuses, making investment in electoral politics a more attractive strategy for opposition leaders than it might otherwise be. As Schedler notes, this is the sort of context in which flawed elections can trigger an iterative process of refinement and adaptation of the rules of the game.18 Greater certainty regarding the longevity of the rules of the game makes investing in those rules less risky to political actors and avoiding such investment more costly. On the other hand, Mozambique’s extensive and consistent problems with election administration, particularly with respect to transparency, threaten to undermine the legitimacy of elections in the minds of voters and opposition parties. The intensity of international involvement to which Mozambique has been subjected cannot last indefinitely. If opposition parties have little basis for trusting in the probity of elections after international attention diminishes, incentives for them to invest in party development needed to win free and fair electoral contests are significantly diminished. Where it appears that one can only win by manipulating the administration of elections, parties are likely to focus their efforts there, rather than on improving their ability to win elections “fair and square.” The Nature of Renamo’s External Environment From 1994–2004, the electoral arena did not present a particularly complex environment from Renamo’s perspective. Due to the polarization of the party system around Renamo and Frelimo, Renamo faced relatively few choices with respect to electoral alliances, with these essentially being limited to whether or not to allow the smaller parties to ride on its coattails. The creation of the Electoral Union (UE) in 1999 served as both an electoral alliance and a parliamentary voting bloc, because Renamo entered parliament as part of Renamo-UE, and therefore it formed a single bench or caucus. Yet there was never any question of who would call the shots in parliament, and though the electoral alliance assured that the smaller parties would throw their support behind Dhlakama for president, their combined weight was negligible.


In addition, again due to the polarization of the electoral arena engendered by the war, Renamo was able to get by without seriously rethinking its collective identity or the nature of its electoral appeals. The polarization of the social and political arenas created by the war carried over into the postwar period, with support for Frelimo strongest in the south and extreme north and support for Renamo concentrated in the central provinces. Renamo has been able to continue to bill itself as a “coalition of the marginalized,” victimized by regional socioeconomic and political bias built into the Frelimo governing system.19 These disequilibria continue to coincide with longstanding ethnoregional divisions, offering support for Renamo’s argument that Frelimo is deliberately seeking to exclude certain parts of the country from full participation in national political and economic life. Structural constraints on Frelimo’s ability to improve living conditions for those in the most economically depressed areas, from which Renamo draws much support, reinforce Renamo’s political position. Additionally, the dearth of economic opportunities in the private sector for most Mozambicans has made it relatively easy for the party to attract mid-level leaders and candidates for office with the promise of a parliamentary salary or eventual proximity to the state and its control of economic resources. Finally, the fact that Renamo has been in opposition throughout the postwar period means that it has not had to adjust its wartime rallying cries to conform with the real constraints on economic development in Mozambique.20 These constraints include, among other things, historic imbalances in the distribution of physical infrastructure and capital investment. As a result, the pattern of support for the two major parties changed little across the three postwar general elections. Support for Frelimo and Renamo in each election has mirrored their respective wartime patterns of support, with Renamo finding its strongest social base in the country’s five central provinces and in rural areas. Frelimo’s base in the south and extreme north and in the larger cities followed a long established pattern as well. In each election, Frelimo has won a comfortable, though not overwhelming, majority in parliament. Overall, these electoral results place Mozambique with the majority of sub-Saharan countries in which repeated elections have brought little change in the underlying balance of power in interparty politics. Support for Renamo fell off significantly in 2004—due in large part to poor voter turnout, particularly in core Renamo areas.21 This reflected improved economic performance and concentrated efforts by the government over the years to invest in public infrastructure in Renamo’s strongholds. And in the wake of the 2004 elections, Renamo’s environment began to look somewhat more challenging. First, the new president, Armando Guebuza, adopted an aggressive stance toward institutionalizing Frelimo’s

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control of the state and freely used the party’s control of the state apparatus to consolidate the party’s grip. Workplace and neighborhood party cells were reconstituted and the importance of party loyalty reaffirmed. The ruling party created new positions—city governor and city administrator—who report directly to the government, ostensibly to keep tabs on elected mayors.22 Changes in electoral rules also introduced new environmental complexity for Renamo. In December 2006, the National Assembly approved new electoral legislation, over the strenuous but ineffectual objections of Renamo. The new rules modified the size and composition of the National Elections Commission (CNE) and eliminated the five-percent threshold for parties to win seats in parliament. The new CNE was comprised of thirteen members, down from nineteen for the 2004 elections. In the previous CNE, parties with seats in parliament appointed eighteen of the nineteen members (in proportion to their seat share), while civil society appointed the CNE’s nineteenth member, its president. Under the new rules, parliamentary parties would choose five members, again in proportion to their seat shares, while “legally recognized civil society bodies” would appoint the remaining eight.23 This gives Renamo far less direct control over the membership of the CNE, the body responsible for administering elections in Mozambiqiue. The elimination of the five-percent threshold represented a major defeat for Renamo, which had originally advocated for an even higher barrier to entry into parliament in an effort to limit competition. It was particularly fearful that Frelimo would subsidize small parties that could be elected to parliament as Frelimo allies and undermine Renamo’s leverage in that body.24 Had the five-percent rule been lifted for the 2004 legislative elections, only one party, Raul Domingos’s Party of Development and Democracy (PDD), would have gained seats in parliament as a result. Nevertheless, the change in rules is likely to stimulate more strategic and proactive behavior on the part of the opposition parties, behavior that Frelimo will be keen to encourage. Renamo’s major connection to the political system, what gives it standing as the leading opposition party, is its still sizeable representation in parliament, despite the fact that it has never had a majority or even a plurality in that body. If that representation were to be diluted by the inclusion of a number of smaller parties, it would be that much easier to ignore Renamo. Perhaps most importantly, after the 2004 elections Frelimo found itself only seven votes short of a two-thirds majority in the legislature, the qualified majority that is required for constitutional changes. There is little chance of aisle crossing between the two major parties at this point, but it clearly would not take much to completely eviscerate Renamo as an opposition force in parliament. This would not only affect Renamo’s strength with respect to


interparty competition. It would also diminish a major source of patronage for party cadres—the salaries they receive as deputies. This in turn would be likely to increase the internal pressure on Renamo’s leadership. Responses This section explores Renamo’s responses to electoral politics along two dimensions: engagement with political institutions, and internal party organization. Party Engagement with Political Institutions As discussed in Chapter 1, in investigating parties’ behavior toward political institutions we are primarily interested in whether they make an effort to invest in these institutions, or whether they seek regularly to circumvent them. In reality, the situation is rarely so simple, for parties will comply with and perhaps seek to strengthen those institutions that play to their advantages and further their interests, while seeking to weaken, evade, or modify those that do not. Renamo is a regular participant in electoral processes and in parliament. In both arenas, however, its behavior is somewhat paradoxical. On one hand, the party has been a consistent and active participant in struggles to define, refine, and improve application of the formal rules and procedures governing elections, and it participates actively in the life of the legislature (Assembly of the Republic, hereafter AR), with members serving on the Standing Committee and all other committees and participating regularly and enthusiastically in most debates. The party has also been a central actor in the reform of electoral legislation and in the administration of elections through its representation on CNE and on the Technical Secretariat for Electoral Administration (STAE). Thus it could be said that the party has invested considerable time and energy in electoral politics and democratic governance, and has risked the challenges to internal party order that, theoretically, would come with that. On the other hand, Renamo’s engagement is limited, first by a persistent refusal to accept the outcomes of these processes at face value, and second by Dhlakama’s habit of cutting off potential internal rivals at the kneecaps. The latter has led him to place strong constraints on the ability of the party’s parliamentary bench to be consistent or effective on important issues, and it has deprived Renamo of some of its most able representatives in parliament. The party’s refusal to accept the outcomes of elections and of legislative processes as definitive has led it to weaken the institutions associated with these

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processes. Thus the party has made clear that elections are but the opening salvo in a series of negotiations about how power will be allocated. This strategy is enabled by the significant and consistent problems with election administration in Mozambique over the years, which have allowed the party to declare that it accepts the election results only in the interest of peace and democracy and that it expects to receive due compensation for this. Similarly, in parliament Renamo has always been in the minority and thus rarely able to prevail over the wishes of the Frelimo party. On issues that Renamo feels strongly about, the party has typically resorted to boycotts or disruption of the debates, followed by boycotts of the vote in the AR. In this way, the party seeks to argue that it is a willing participant, but that its participation is necessarily limited by the flaws of democracy in Mozambique.25 The first two years after the signing of the GPA in October 1992—the period of most active international engagement in the process—saw the establishment of enduring strategies on the part of Renamo with respect to its participation in postwar politics. For example, Renamo used its participation in the peace commissions, and later in the demobilization process, as a lever to secure its needs in other areas—to ensure that the government and the international community followed through on their commitments to fund Renamo’s transformation into a political party and to secure a greater role for the UN in ensuring the security of Renamo personnel and the impartiality of the peace accord’s implementation. This behavior foreshadowed Renamo’s participation in both the electoral process and parliament, where the party has habitually turned to post hoc bargaining, with both the government and international actors, to achieve goals that it was unable to attain through formal democratic processes and institutions. The rest of this section explores these strategies in detail, looking first at electoral processes and then at Renamo’s behavior in the legislature. As I have discussed elsewhere, each of Mozambique’s postwar electoral periods provide concrete examples of Renamo’s two-pronged approach to confronting multiparty politics.26 Essentially, Renamo has used its participation in formal electoral processes to initiate a bargaining process with the ruling party. Renamo has engaged each time in the electoral process. And each time, Renamo has resorted to a boycott of either the voting process or its outcomes. These boycotts of the formal electoral process served two purposes. First, they allowed the party to save face in the event of a loss at the polls. Second, they acted as a catalyst for the initiation of informal bargaining between the Renamo and Frelimo leadership. The catalyst effect was reliable in part because, under the watchful eye of international donors and potential investors, Frelimo was keen to preserve the perception that Mozambique had established a durable peace. Frelimo’s top leadership has therefore had reason


to engage Renamo in informal negotiations despite some internal opposition to the practice. For both the 1994 and 1999 elections, Renamo participated fully but used complaints about both the process and results of those elections to command public attention and to attempt to gain leverage with the ruling party. In 1994, the party engaged in an aborted boycott, then was persuaded to rejoin the process when the international community promised to investigate.27 Immediately following the elections, Renamo issued demands for power sharing in the form of some sort of “unity government” at national level, an idea that had also been floated by some representatives of the international community. The party called for a say in the appointment of governors in the five provinces in which the party had won a majority of legislative votes. Both were flatly rejected by President Chissano.28 In 1999, Renamo again hedged its bets by participating in elections and then denouncing them in the wake of serious problems with election administration, particularly in the vote tabulation process. Though the voting process was viewed by most observers as relatively free and fair, a large number of tally sheets were excluded from the tabulation process. As noted earlier, these far exceeded President Chissano’s slim margin of victory over Renamo candidate Dhlakama. Renamo immediately contested the results, lodging a legal challenge with the Supreme Court and threatening to boycott the new parliament. When the Court dismissed the party’s challenge as groundless without addressing the central issues of transparency and credibility that it raised, Renamo demanded a recount and refused to take up its seats in parliament. When its coalition partners in UE rejected the latter strategy, Renamo deputies returned to parliament and sponsored a resolution to create a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the election results. This proposal was voted down by the Frelimo majority. Renamo then announced that it no longer recognized the Frelimo government and insisted on talks between Dhlakama and Chissano as a condition for the party’s further cooperation. Dhlakama also persisted in his demand for a recount. And as in 1994, Renamo called for a share in political power through governorships in the six provinces where Renamo had won a majority of the vote. The party also announced that it would form shadow provincial governments in those provinces in the interim, and that it would instruct its personnel to stop cooperating with the government.29 In response to these demands, President Chissano agreed to set up a dialogue with Dhlakama but refused to include Renamo in the selection of provincial governorships. A year after the elections, Renamo organized a series of peaceful demonstrations that resulted in violent confrontations with police in several provinces. More than forty people were killed in the most

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serious violence since the end of the war in 1992. In Montepuez, in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, protestors attacked a police station in an attempt to seize weapons. Several weeks later eighty-three prisoners, arrested during the confrontation in Montepuez, died of suffocation in a tiny jail cell while awaiting trial. In the wake of these disturbances, Dhlakama reiterated his demands for a recount and for provincial level power sharing, and added calls for restructuring of the judiciary and equal representation for Renamo in the police and security forces. In March 2001 the halting “dialogue” that had been carried on between the two parties for the better part of two years ended abruptly when Chissano made clear that no action would be taken concerning Renamo’s demands.30 This pattern was repeated after the 2004 elections, whose results Renamo once again decried as fraudulent (again, not without some justification, as noted earlier). Thirty-seven polling stations—serving some 400,000 voters— never opened, and there were once again confirmed examples of questionable administration as well as outright fraud. The voter register again proved to be problematic, with estimates of the total number of actual registered voters varying from around 7 million to 10.4 million. The discrepancy arose from a large, but unspecified number of duplicate names in the voter register. One observer group noted that “even though 85 percent of the polling stations had functioned normally, observers regarded the problems in the remaining 15 percent as unacceptable.”31 The most serious instances of fraud and intimidation appear to have occurred in Tete province, where Frelimo pulled an unprecedented six seats from Renamo and turnout was reported at 100 percent in a number of polling stations (with 90 percent of this vote going to Guebuza). There were also problems in other provinces. In Zambezia, for example, provincial officials apparently pulled tally sheets for hundreds of polling stations showing victories for Renamo, so that these were never sent to Maputo and were not included in the final count.32 Renamo party delegates were arrested on election day, in contravention of the election law, in at least six provinces, and in some cases Renamo delegates were prevented by police from spending the night with the ballot boxes between the two days of voting, as provided for by law. In Gaza, Renamo party representatives were beaten, and their houses burned.33 For the third time in three general elections, Renamo leader Afonso Dhlakama announced that his party would boycott the results of these elections, due to irregularities in the electoral process. Dhlakama called for an annulment of the results and threatened that the party would not take up its seats in parliament.34 Renamo also attempted once again to use the legal recourse established for contesting electoral results, bringing an appeal first to the National Electoral Commission (CNE) and then to the Constitutional Court.


However, consistent with past experience, Renamo bungled the appeal by failing to meet technical requirements, and consequently its complaints were dismissed with little consideration of its substantive merits.35 Dhlakama publicly rejected the results and threatened to boycott parliament, but the party took its seats in the end. In late 2006, the question of further reform for the CNE was discussed in the AR, as were rules designed to limit fraud and mistakes at the polls. On all of these issues, Renamo’s position was based on the same principle—parity of representation for Renamo and Frelimo on all decision-making bodies, particularly those involved in making, administering, and adjudicating the rules about elections. Renamo’s success in influencing politics in Mozambique thus far has depended almost entirely on the polarization of the political arena around itself and Frelimo. Where formal representation has not been enough to reinforce its desired position of parity with the ruling party (as in election results for presidential or parliamentary elections), Renamo has consistently and successfully asserted itself as a “veto player,” defined by Tsebelis as “individual or collective actors whose agreement is necessary for a change of the status quo.”36 This section has thus far illustrated Renamo’s ability to supplement electoral politics with negotiating tactics based on its role as the government’s “partner in peace” and the only viable opposition to the ruling party, which had been in power since 1975. The party’s behavior in the legislature provides additional examples of this strategy. It also provides insight into how the party leadership has responded to internal challenges arising from the party’s participation in democratic governing institutions. In the Assembly of the Republic, Renamo has never held a plurality of seats. Undaunted by defeat along procedural lines or by majority vote, the party has routinely resorted to boycott and disruption of parliamentary proceedings that go against its wishes. Such protests have been almost uniformly without effect, other than serving as an irritation to Frelimo and a way to stay in the public eye. More important have been the habitual calls for direct ‘dialogue’ with the president, first Chissano and then Guebuza. For example, following the December 2006 passage of the new electoral legislation over Renamo objections, Dhalkama asserted that the “dictatorship of the majority” had prevailed, and that the only salvation was direct negotiations between Dhlakama and Guebuza.37 With Guebuza in office, his plea was ignored. This was a marked change from past practice. Beginning soon after the seating of the first multiparty legislature in 1994, Renamo deputies routinely reacted to their impotence before the majority vote by sitting mutely in the Assembly during debate.38 Over time, the party’s

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tactics became more disruptive. Toward the end of 2002 (October through December), Renamo deputies engaged in an escalating confrontation with the Assembly’s Standing Committee over the question of whether five defectors from the Renamo party (Raul Domingos and four other long-standing members of the party) should be allowed to keep their seats in the Assembly. The AR rules did not require members who left the party they were elected under to abandon their seats, unless they joined another party. However, Renamo’s parliamentary delegation insisted that the Assembly president, Eduardo Mulembwe (Frelimo), expel the five. When the resolution that had been proposed by Renamo, requiring the five to vacate their seats, failed to pass, Renamo MPs began banging the tables, whistling, and shouting. After two days, the police were called in and, following a tense standoff, the confrontation was defused with the five ‘dissidents’ retaining their seats.39 Four years later, after Frelimo had moved ahead on a vote on electoral legislation over Renamo’s objections, Renamo’s legislative deputies engaged in similar obstructive tactics during the plenary session at which the legislation was discussed and voted on. “Members of the Renamo-Electoral Union opposition coalition shouted, chanted, danced in the aisles, banged on the tables, blew whistles,” prompting the Assembly to draft a code of conduct in an effort to avoid a repeat performance.40 Apart from directing the party’s legislative delegation to physically disrupt AR proceedings, Renamo’s leadership has sought to circumvent the outcomes of legislative processes by calling for direct negotiations with the President of the Republic (again, using its position as peace partner to gain leverage). It has also sought to limit the freedom of maneuver that its parliamentary bench has, with Dhlakama frequently intervening to dictate strategy. The chair of an ad hoc parliamentary committee created to discuss refinements to the CNE in 2006 noted for example that it was “painful to work on the commission with colleagues who clearly have no autonomy and are taking orders from outside [of parliament].”41 Thus with respect to political institutions, Dhlakama has followed well entrenched patterns of behavior that, for more than ten years, have helped prevent the party’s habitual electoral defeats from weakening his position as the undisputed leader of a highly centralized and personalized party. These behaviors are all characterized by Dhlakama’s refusal to surrender to the consequences dictated by formally prescribed institutions and procedures. Instead, he has asserted his party’s ability to act as a veto player, using the leverage granted to his party by the peace accords, which enshrined Renamo, if only temporarily, in a position of parity with the ruling party as partners in peace making and democratic state building.


By asserting power and privilege on the basis of Renamo’s status as a former rebel movement and therefore an integral part of a postwar peace-building process premised on the construction of democracy, Dhlakama not only secured the party’s leverage as veto player. He also secured his own position at the head of the organization. Renamo’s behavior is shaped not so much by rules as by an interpretation of its proper role in the postwar political system. Specifically, Dhlakama has asserted that the party’s participation in the political system should be proportionate not to its vote share, but to its importance in the war and in the peace process, and that its behavior could not be predicted on the basis of the rules of the game, but was rather a function of Dhlakama’s own understanding about the party’s role. Dhlakama has successfully prevailed as the arbiter of that interpretation, with support from the international community of donors in Mozambique. Thus the management of Renamo’s image has been an integral part of Dhlakama’s own strategy for remaining at the head of his party. However, with the passing of time, it appears that Renamo is less able to rely on polarization in the political arena to guarantee it a reliable stock of voter support. In the 2004 elections, turnout was particularly poor in the party’s heartland in the central provinces, and the Frelimo candidate for president (who was not the incumbent) won by a larger margin than in either of the two previous elections. Moreover, the results of the 2003 municipal and the 2004 presidential and legislative elections—in which voter support for Renamo fell significantly—highlight Renamo’s organizational weaknesses. Hanlon for example notes that in 2003 there was a high level of variation in results across cities that were expected to express strong support for Renamo. He argues that the variation can be directly attributed to the party’s efforts and capacity in mobilizing voters: “Renamo lost [in 2003 municipal elections] in cities it expected to win like Milange and Mocuba because its supporters did not vote. By contrast in 2003 turnouts were above average and Renamo did well in cities where it mobilized, notably Beira, Nacala, Ilha de Moçambique and Mocimboa da Praia.”42 Hanlon highlights in particular the party’s failure to mobilize youth and traditional authorities. The latter may have been particularly important in Renamo’s unexpectedly strong showing in the 1994 elections, when Renamo successfully presented itself as the party that would restore traditional authorities the status they had lost when Frelimo came to power after independence. Particularly telling is the fact that, after turnout proved to be low on the first day of voting in 2004, Frelimo was able to mobilize its supporters to get out the vote, while Renamo lacked both the means and the organizational coherence to mount a last minute mobilization effort.43 “In 2004, Renamo

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did not mobilize its base, trusting in the venom of popular discontent with the regime, and few went to the polls.”44 Internal Change The shift to electoral politics, and the consequent need to recruit new cadres, created two fault lines in Renamo. The first was between those who had participated directly in Renamo’s military organization during the war and those who were either postwar recruits or who had served as clandestine members in Mozambique’s cities or as external representatives and advisers living outside the country. The second was between those who occupied a seat in parliament—Renamo’s only direct access to political power—and those who did not. These two cleavage lines cross-cut one another. Initially, the single most important challenge to intraelite relations as a result of electoral politics came from the party’s need to expand its upper and middle ranks to fill its seats on formal peace commissions and later in parliament. At the end of the war, Renamo’s top managerial level was comprised of a thin layer of individuals with, on average, a secondary school education, most of whom had been captured during attacks on secondary schools and work places. They had worked their way to the top by proving their loyalty to Dhlakama and, later, by demonstrating their usefulness in bolstering the organization’s external relations. Most in this group, for example, served as Renamo’s representatives in Europe and in peace talks.45 While the core leadership in place at the end of the war transitioned rather smoothly into positions in the party’s internal hierarchy, the party had to recruit new people to fill out its candidate lists for parliamentary elections. These were, for the most part, either new recruits or people who had supported Renamo during the war through membership in clandestine urban cells. Either way, they were largely unknown and untested from the point of view of the party’s core leadership. In the first legislature, only 18 of the 112 deputies elected for Renamo had been “in the bush” during the war.46 Thus, while a handful of trusted leaders from the war headed up the parliamentary delegation, the majority of wartime party leadership looked on from their unpaid positions as leaders of party departments, while newer recruits enjoyed the salaries and perquisites of parliamentary deputies. In response, the party hierarchy, led by Dhlakama (who is not a member of parliament), has systematically sought to limit the independence of the parliamentary bench, with negative effects on its parliamentary performance and on the consolidation of the parliament as a whole.47 These trends continued after the 1999 and 2004 elections. In preparation for each of the three electoral contests, Dhlakama made an effort to reach out


to well-educated individuals who were, for one reason or another, disenchanted with Frelimo and willing to lend their support to Renamo. In 1999, for example, Renamo had sought to appeal to business interests in the center of the country and to bolster its roster of professionals from the south. In 1999 and 2004, Renamo joined forces for the legislative elections with a group of ten smaller opposition parties, known collectively as the Electoral Union (UE). In 2004, a group of intellectuals, mainly from Eduardo Mondlane University but also from a handful of private universities, were invited to join forces with the party. In each of these efforts, Renamo enjoyed a measure of success in attracting new and better-prepared individuals to its ranks. Particularly for the 2004 election, Renamo’s fortunes were boosted by deep disenchantment among Maputo’s intellectual and professional classes with government corruption, crystallized in the Carlos Cardoso murder trial.48 Yet in each of these instances, the newcomers carried relatively little weight within the party. Moreover, those who demonstrated a commitment to effective performance in parliament were eventually shown the door. As Carbone points out, “In the Assembleia, a Renamo parliamentarian having anything more than basic contacts with majority MPs undermines his own reputation inside the party.”49 Examples abound. Raul Domingos and a handful of the party’s leading legislative deputies, most of whom had been in leadership positions in Renamo’s wartime military organization, were the first casualties of this tendency. Domingos, an effective leader in the AR and the former military chief of staff for Renamo, was dismissed from the party shortly after the 1999 elections in the wake of accusations that he was too close to Frelimo.50 Thus not even highly placed ex-combatants were spared if they were perceived as having gained too much power. Dhlakama, outside of parliament, was threatened by the visibility and proximity to the ruling party that members of his party’s legislative delegation were afforded. In addition, he was pressured by former military commanders in the organization, most of them living outside of Maputo in areas of strong Renamo support, who had not been appointed by the party to political positions. These ex-commanders continually warned the leadership against “selling them out” and acted as a counterweight to the influence of those within the party who had benefited directly from electoral politics. Shortly after Domingos was dismissed, David Alone, a top Dhlakama adviser who had not been part of the military organization and a leading parliamentarian for Renamo took over the role of leading the “dialogue” with President Chissano in 2001. He soon fell victim to the same fate as Domingos. Alone, who held a seat on the National Assembly’s powerful

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Standing Committee, was brought before an ad hoc party commission of inquiry and was dismissed for allegedly allying himself with Frelimo figures. Alone’s dismissal coincided with the shift of former Renamo general Ossufo Momade from the position of political delegate in Nampula, where he had served for several years, to a position in the party’s national secretariat in Maputo, where he was put in charge of social affairs and demobilized troops.51 This signified in the eyes of some observers a reassertion of the power of the combatants who remained outside of public office. In November 2001, Renamo held a party congress (its first since war’s end, though “national conferences” of central and provincial leadership structures had been held several times since the transitional elections in 1994). Joaquim Vaz, the party’s longtime representative in Portugal—and not an ex-combatant—was elected secretary-general. Vaz’s priorities as secretarygeneral—internal transparency and a better working relationship with Frelimo—placed him on a firm collision course with Dhlakama, who removed Vaz less than a year after he took the post. Dhlakama then took steps that further deinstitutionalized the party—he took over as secretary-general himself and dissolved the national political commission.52 The same sort of behavior has been applied systematically to the party’s delegations to the AR and to the electoral commission (CNE). In addition to removing people from access to public office when they showed signs of developing loyalty to their institutions and not just to their party, Dhlakama displayed a penchant for micromanaging the legislative delegation and other party delegations to public institutions. It is important to note that Dhlakama’s unwillingness to delegate enough power and autonomy to the party’s parliamentary delegation to allow it to function also reflected a persistent distrust of the ruling party. Perhaps not surprisingly, given Mozambique’s decades as a party-state ruled by Frelimo, Dhlakama seemed to identify loyalty to public institutions, such as parliament or the electoral commissions, with betrayal of Renamo. Thus Renamo’s commitment (or lack thereof ) to the new democratic institutions was part and parcel of Dhlakama’s distrust of the ruling party. This pattern of behavior has required that Renamo regularly recruit new cadres to replace those Dhlakama has deemed compromised. In 2004 the recruitment process was somewhat different from previous occasions. In that year, a group of sixty to seventy intellectuals and professionals, sought out Renamo as “the only viable opposition in Mozambique,” in an effort to build a clear alternative to Frelimo.53 Unlike in previous instances, these new recruits came in as a self-conscious cohort, and they brought with them a coherent agenda that sought to use Renamo as a vehicle to bring about changes in the practice of politics in Mozambique.


The self-declared agenda of this group was threefold—first, to democratize the party; second, to sharpen the party’s identity and thereby strengthen its electoral appeal; and third, to strengthen its ability to serve as an effective check on the ruling party. Calls for reform of Renamo had begun to appear with increasing frequency in the independent media after 1999. For example, an editorial in the weekly paper Zambeze complained that Renamo was taking its voter base for granted: “Constrained and delinked from its base, Renamo will not reach power. . . . Within ‘the partridge’ [the nickname for Renamo], there is the idea that the people are angry with Frelimo, and therefore will vote, just on that basis, for Renamo. Reality shows that Dhlakama and his collaborators have to work more and stop simply pretending to work.”54 The group of intellectuals is particularly interesting because they sought out Renamo on their own initiative, with a policy agenda in mind. Chief among their concerns was government corruption. Among the group’s goals was to forge a clearer identity for the party based on advocacy of a free market economy and opposition to oligopolistic control of key economic sectors. As one of this group put it, “Renamo’s policies weren’t ideal, but we thought we could change them. We are outspoken, and the government has had to make certain adjustments. . . . [W]e feel that we’ve reached a certain level of success because the government knows someone is watching who can use the internet, who can analyze, who has international contacts.”55 In the past, Renamo successfully sought out individuals who, for personal or policy reasons, were willing to work for the party. This was the first time that a group of any significant size had sought out Renamo as a vehicle for advancing a specific policy agenda. There are some small signs of change within the party since 2004. First, in 2007 Dhlakama for the first time publicly recognized that the party was organizationally weak and that he must listen to his critics. The Lusa press agency reported that Dhlakama “has accepted criticism of inertia leveled at his party by both national and international circles and promised to work hard to win next year’s [2008] provincial elections.” Dhlakama admitted that “the criticism leveled at us warrants serious consideration.”56 This admission came on the heels of a study, commissioned by the party and funded by the Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Development and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, that used anonymous questionnaires to solicit members’ views of the problems and weaknesses within the party. According to the spokesman for Renamo’s parliamentary bench—who is a member of the group that joined Renamo in the years leading up to the 2004 election—“the party leadership has had to learn that criticism is part of the growth process.”57

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In fact, criticism of the party within internal party forums is not new. What is new is public acknowledgement of these problems by Dhlakama. In 1994, shortly after the first multiparty elections, Dhlakama and his lieutenants listened to several days’ worth of criticism from provincial and district delegates at a national party conference in Quelimane. Allegations ran the gamut from incompetence to corruption to charges of ethnic favoritism, though none of these criticisms were leveled at Dhlakama himself. Dhlakama listened to the proceedings and later announced a few minor reforms in the organization of the party hierarchy as well as his wish to create a training center for party cadres, but little was done.58 A second, more tangible change since 2004 is a marked increase in the success rate of Renamo’s challenges to government policies, both inside of the AR and in the courts. One example concerns the party’s new spokesperson in parliament, Namburete, who at the time of his election to parliament was Director of the School of Communications at Eduardo Mondlane University, a public university whose rector is appointed by the government. The rector dismissed Namburete and others from their university positions upon their election to parliament as Renamo deputies. Namburete and the others challenged the dismissal and won. In another case, Renamo’s parliamentary bench successfully organized itself to petition against a government decree that all official correspondence be concluded with the slogan, “Decision made, decision implemented,” which to many ears hearkened back to the days of the Frelimo party state. The trouble began when a newly created state entity—the National Civil Service Authority (ANFP)—sent a letter to government bodies ordering them to use the closing on all government correspondence. The Constitutional Court (which by law includes representatives nominated by both major parties) took exception, saying that the ANFP lacked the authority to impose this requirement. The government, however, continued to use the closing, arguing that the Constitutional Council had only issued an opinion, not a formal ruling. For the Council to issue a ruling, a case had to be brought before the Council by any one of several individuals or institutions, including the President of the Republic, the President of the Assembly of the Republic, one-third of the members of the Assembly, and so on. Renamo obtained the signatures of all of its deputies, constituting just over one-third of AR deputies, and brought the case before the Council, asking that the decree be revoked on the grounds that it is unconstitutional.59 This was a rare display of competence by Renamo in confronting government institutions. The results of the landslide losses of Renamo in the 2004 elections also gave rise to unprecedented calls from within the party (and from without) for Dhlakama’s replacement. Joao Gomes Cravinho, for example, argues that


Dhlakama’s decision, announced in early 2006, to seek re-election as the party’s leader (and presumptive presidential candidate) at its next conference “provoked disappointment among reformist elements in Renamo . . . who sought a clean break with the previous leadership, and his re-election was expected to be opposed.”60 Dhlakama had previously announced that he would use the congress to elect a new party leader, but then held elections in which he ran against nonviable candidates. In September 2006 a group of former Renamo officials formed the “Renamo National Salvation Group,” which called for the replacement of Dhlakama as leader of Renamo. Among them was Almeida Tambara, the movement’s wartime media liaison and a prominent member of parliament until the 2004 elections (when he ran on the defeated PDD ticket). The group argued that Dhlakama “is completely privatizing the party” and brooks no dissent, a situation that was increasingly alienating the party’s most able activists.61 Another disaffected party member, who was among a group of lower level district officials that publicly defected to the Frelimo party in September 2006, said “right now those opposition parties regarded as small are making some organizational advances, but Renamo is only disintegrating.”62 The push for change within the party will also have to contend with resistance from the party’s ex-combatants. Some former military commanders who have not participated in postwar politics nevertheless still exercise influence with the party leadership. Their continued influence so many years after the end of war may reflect Dhlakama’s enduring mistrust of the Frelimo government and his desire to maintain at least some semblance of a reserve domain of power. Evidence of such a desire can be found, for example, in Dhlakama’s refusal to give up his personal bodyguard, who should have been integrated into the national police, or the continued existence of men with arms in remote, former Renamo bases. The organization of protests and other “acts of resistance” against “acts of aggression” by local ruling party officials— both common during electoral periods—also relies on the maintenance of a reserve of loyal combat- hardened leaders. These individuals have no direct stake in democratic politics, but a clear interest in maintaining the party’s capacity for extra-constitutional leverage. Electoral Politics and Renamo Renamo entered the political arena as a highly personalized organization, and there were no decision-making organs in the party that were even minimally independent of the leader’s personal discretion. Thus, in Renamo the options for those who sought to steer the party in another direction in response to the

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challenges of electoral politics were extremely limited. Unlike their counterparts in the FMLN, SDS, or HDZ, they could not seek to tinker with or seize control of the party’s decision-making structures, since there were none to speak of. Despite the gradual creation of rule-making bodies on paper, Dhlakama has systematically ignored them when their use is not to his own advantage. Would-be reformers within Renamo have had their upward mobility within the party blocked by the top leadership, causing them to leave rather than reform the party from within. The lesson learned by those within the party from the departure of Raul Domingos and his colleagues—that challenging the existing leadership will get you expelled from the party—was not conducive to the consolidation of Renamo either as an institutionalized party or as one committed to the democratic rules of the game. Dhlakama has so far responded to real and perceived challenges to his leadership by replacing capable individuals with less capable ones, by supplanting people who have gained experience and a stake in democratic politics with those who are dependent on the party for their livelihood and have not had the opportunity to build a following of their own. This permits him to retain full control over choices about when and how much to invest in electoral politics and electoral outcomes. Thus, after three general elections and fourteen years of experience with multiparty politics, Renamo remained a party that is highly personalized and centralized around the figure of Afonso Dhlakama. As Carbone has put it, “Dhlakama was not only a ‘man alone’ but one who wished to remain so, and even under pluralist politics, he retained his unchallenged and personalist control over the party by systematically undermining the development of an effective and democratic party organization.”63 Renamo lacks organizational strength and coherence, in large part because Dhlakama has deliberately stunted organizational development to inoculate himself against internal challenges. Evidence is found in the “disciplinary” proceedings taken against Domingos, Vaz, and Alone and in the party’s irregular holding of congresses (in favor of occasional national conferences which are less visible, less challenging in organizational terms, and easier for Dhlakama to control). The party’s rules call for a congress every two years, but there was only one between 1994 and 2006. Participation in electoral politics has thus far provided few incentives for Renamo to institutionalize, in large part because polarization has provided the party with a fairly steady base of support. Moreover, Renamo believes it can make a credible case to its own electorate that the elections are consistently rigged against the party. Therefore, Renamo’s leaders can argue that electoral disappointments are not the fault of the party leadership.


However, the 2004 general election results suggest that this may be beginning to change. Electoral rules adopted in 2006 will make it easier for Frelimo and small opposition parties to enter into strategic alliances to diminish Renamo’s power in the legislature and at municipal levels. And as the civil war recedes into the realm of distant memory, Renamo’s electoral success, both at local and national levels, depends increasingly on its performance in parliament and in local government. In the years between the 1999 and 2004 general elections, the Frelimo government made a concerted effort to improve basic living conditions in some of Renamo’s stronghold areas, and the recovery of the economy also served to improve life in those areas. Renamo deserved and got little or no credit for these improvements. Second, the elimination of the five-percent threshold required as a condition of entry into the Assembly will dilute political polarization over time and strengthen the smaller parties even as it challenges Renamo to perform. Finally, Renamo’s leadership remains committed to being perceived as a good faith player in the democratic arena, despite Dhlakama’s intolerance of his internal rivals. This will place constraints on the lengths to which Dhlakama is willing or able to go to stave off internal challenges. And internal challenges are likely to become stiffer over time as the conditions that have allowed Dhlakama to succeed with a deinstitutionalized party erode. Some donor-funded programs, like those of NIMD (Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy), NDI (National Democratic Institute) or IRI (International Republican Institute), have offered support to parties for capacity-building projects. These have helped to strengthen a cohort of midlevel leaders within Renamo that is committed to democratic politics and to the use of established channels for addressing the flaws in the system. However, thus far Dhlakama has allowed little scope for initiative by these pro-electoral elements. The replacement of President Chissano by his successor, Armando Emilio Guebuza, the party’s candidate for the 2004 elections, marked a clear shift for the ruling Frelimo party away from past patterns of tolerance and conciliation toward Renamo and changed the political environment.64 Under Guebuza, Frelimo adopted aggressive measures to create a reinforced party machine patterned, to some degree, after the party-state model. Thus with the changing of the guard at the head of Frelimo and Renamo’s 2004 electoral decline, Renamo faced challenges of a different order of magnitude in the arena of interparty competition. Yet as discussed earlier, even as Frelimo made visible efforts to consolidate its hold on power, a sizeable group of university professors and other professionals made the decision to offer their services to Renamo. This group, which

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included professors and deans from the country’s flagship public university, has made a positive impact on Renamo’s ability to challenge Frelimo’s dominance through the courts by importing a group of cadres with the capacity to bring effective legal challenges against government rulings, as well as to act efficaciously in the parliament. The influx of this fairly large, well-educated, and purposeful group, which expressly seeks to create out of Renamo a viable counterbalance to the ruling Frelimo party, marks a qualitatively different development in the life of the party from what has come before. The goal of this group and its allies within the party is to advance Renamo from a simple electoral vehicle to an electoral vehicle attached to a coherent policy agenda. It is far too early to say whether it will succeed, though Renamo’s past experience does not provide grounds for optimism. Nevertheless, this development offers a useful punctuation mark to the central argument of this chapter. Renamo has consistently participated in electoral politics, and over time constituencies for greater investment in electoral politics have emerged. However, in the first decade and a half since the end of the war, those constituencies have been defeated by the interaction of interparty and intraparty politics.

Figure 3.1 Country Map of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina

CHAPTER 3

Bosnia: HDZ, SDS, and the Three-Level Game Introduction

W

hen Bosnia’s war ended in 1995, many observers and policymakers—both foreign and domestic —believed that the key to building a durable peace lay in creating a democratic political system. Electoral competition, it was argued, would act as a moderating force on the ethnonationalist parties that had led Bosnia into war. For this to be realized, however, the dominant parties would have to be either reformed or weakened. Electoral competition at the onset of postwar politics was dominated by three major ethnonationalist parties: the Democratic Party of Action (SDA), the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), and the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). Accordingly, the country’s electoral systems were designed to encourage multiethnic parties and campaigns and to weaken the three dominant ethnonationalist parties. International authorities like the Office of the High Representative (OHR) and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) were created and empowered to organize elections and to supervise the formation of government and the conduct of political parties. This chapter explores the impact of electoralism on two of the three major ethnonationalist parties: HDZ (Croatian Democratic Union) and SDS (Serbian Democratic Party). In both parties examined here, the pressures of electoral competition, combined with intensive direct pressure from international authorities, succeeded in creating a constituency for electoralism. In each party, a group of politicians emerged who believed that their goals could be achieved by investing in the democratic rules of the game and by bolstering the role of credible elections as the centerpiece of the management of political conflict. In SDS this group prevailed, while in HDZ it did not.


This chapter offers an explanation for this outcome in the distinctive dynamics of the multi-level games in which the leaders of each party were engaged. While the two parties’ dominant coalitions were subject to similar pressures from international authorities in the country, the outcomes for party organization were different. This difference is due largely to the different electoral environments the two parties faced. While SDS was obliged to change its vote-getting strategy to compete effectively, HDZ was not. Thus the leadership was better able to resist direct challenges to its authority, confident in its ability to continue to attract sufficient votes to stay in the game. In contrast to Mozambique, in Bosnia the structural rigidities that bolstered the electoral positions of the former armed opposition groups had not begun to wear off by the end of the period under examination. This is due in part to the fact that in Bosnia these were enshrined in the constitution, which was itself part of the peace agreement. The extended and intensive involvement of the international community further reinforced these constraints and their impact on the outcomes of electoral competition. The Contexts of Electoral Competition in Bosnia and Herzegovina Historical Overview In 1992 Bosnia, then part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, followed its neighbors and erstwhile countrymen in Slovenia and Croatia in their efforts to break away from Yugoslavia and form independent states. Bosnia was soon engulfed in a war that first pitted Bosnian Muslims and Croats against the Serb-led Yugoslav government in Belgrade, together with its local Bosnian Serb counterparts, and then turned Muslims and Croats on one another as all sides scrambled to define the geographic and ethnic parameters of a postYugoslav Bosnian Republic. On the Bosnian side, the fighting was led by militarized versions of the first political parties formed in the first postcommunist era elections in 1990: the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and the Bosnian Muslim-based Party of Democratic Action (SDA), which led government during the war. These were the parties that negotiated the Dayton Accord (together with the leaders of Croatia and what remained of Yugoslavia, who had supported HDZ and SDS, respectively), and they were the dominant parties in the postwar political arena. In November 1995, the General Framework Agreement on Peace, popularly known as the Dayton Agreement, put an end to open warfare in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This agreement, signed by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman on behalf of the Bosnian Croats, created the Republic of Bosnia and

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Herzegovina out of the existing Federation of BiH and the Republika Srpska (RS). Each entity was to have its own government with extensive powers of self-government, with the Republic responsible for a limited set of functions to include monetary policy, trade and foreign policy, and customs and immigration. The Dayton Agreement established the Office of the High Representative to oversee implementation of the peace accord. The High Representative was given “final authority in theater” on civilian aspects of implementation, including the power to impose legislation and remove public officials from office for obstructing provisions of the Dayton Agreement. The OHR was filled by a European diplomat appointed by and accountable to the countries that were sponsoring Bosnia’s peace process.1 The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was given authority to organize elections. Civil authority was backed by a 32,000-strong NATO-led “stabilization force,” known as SFOR.2 Constitutional Framework and Party System The state of Bosnia and Herzegovina was cobbled together on paper at the Dayton peace talks out of two separate, pre-existing entities: the Republika Srpska, which had been declared as such by Radovan Karad˘zić and his supporters at the beginning of the war and then legalized and officially recognized by the Dayton Peace Agreement, and the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, created by the Washington Agreement of March 1994, in a bid by international mediators to put an end to at least one layer of conflict in Bosnia, that between Muslims and Croats which had broken out in force in early 1993. The Federation is majority Muslim in population, with a relatively small Croat minority (below 25 percent in 1994), and governance is built on a welter of mechanisms meant to ensure ethnic balance between Croats and Muslims, from power sharing at municipal level to explicit ethnic balancing in the composition of the Federation cabinet. The Federation is subdivided into ten cantons and, below that, municipalities. The Republika Srpska (RS), on the other hand, was nearly entirely Serb at its creation, having been the product of ruthlessly efficient ethnic cleansing and determined opposition to Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement, which stipulates the right of all refugees and displaced persons to return to their prewar homes. RS was essentially a unitary state, with two levels of government (municipality and entity) to the Federation’s three. On top of this uneven structure was placed the wobbly central government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.


Beginning in 2004, minority returnees and changes in the constitutions of both entities (mandated by Bosnia’s constitutional court) succeeded in achieving some limited redress for wartime ethnic cleansing. However, these changes notwithstanding, it is still fair to say that by mid-2007, the Federation was largely divided between Croats and Muslims, with a small minority of Serbs concentrated in a few pockets, while the Serb Republic was majority Serb, with Muslim communities slowly making a comeback and a scattering of Croat returnees. Elections were constitutive of the state itself in Bosnia. As Carl Bildt points out, “Dayton had given Bosnia a peace agreement in which no common institutions were to be established until free and fair elections had been held.”3 Because of the complexity of the BiH constitution, derived from two separate peace agreements (Washington and Dayton), “at least six different elections were now necessary to move the political process forward.”4 Like the constitutional framework, the electoral system that emerged from 1995 onward was the product of multiple and sometimes conflicting goals. Initially, the plan was for international authorities to administer only the first elections as a prelude to the pullout of the international peace-keeping mission as a whole. Instead, the rush to hold elections in 1996 laid down patterns that have been hard to erase and that have necessitated much more intensive and prolonged international involvement. Critics of the U.S.-backed policy to hold elections as soon as possible argued that elections under the wrong conditions would amount to a continuation of the war by other means, allowing both SDS and HDZ to achieve their stated goals: “creating an independent, sovereign, and exclusivist state in the case of the former [SDS] and creating a separate, exclusivist ‘Herceg-Bosna’ entity in the case of the latter.”5 One could argue that this was precisely the effect of these elections, and that much of what the international community has done in Bosnia since has been an attempt to undo them. More than ten years after the peace accord, the dominant parties in both entities were still the parties associated with the belligerents of the 1992–95 war: the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), and the Bosniac-dominated Party of Democratic Action (SDA). The transitional elections in 1996 indeed allowed these parties to consolidate their wartime gains by achieving control of the state at all levels—Republic, entity, canton (in the case of the Federation), and municipal. While a number of “moderate” or multiethnic parties have emerged, none has so far been able to challenge this pattern of dominance. The Alliance for Change, a shaky coalition of ten parties with little in common, succeeded in cobbling together a majority for two years (from 2000–2002), but accomplished little before

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being swept out of power by the nationalist parties in October 2002. The 2006 elections brought SBiH (Party for Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the SNSD (Independent Party of Social Democrats) into power, but these are arguably the second generation of nationalist parties, and not the nonnationalist moderates that the international authorities had hoped for. As the High Representative subsequently reported, though SDA, HDZ, and SDS had weaker support than usual, “their loss of predominance among their respective electorates does not signal, however, any diminution in the salience of national (and nationalistic) issues.” He identified SBiH and SNSD as “among the most vociferous” in calling for changes to the Dayton Agreement in the service of nationalist interests.6 Since the elections themselves were part of the process of building the system, the first elections occurred at a time when the practical constitutional parameters of the system, the rules of the game, and the degree to which they would or could be enforced were all very much up in the air. In this context, parties naturally sought to use elections to push for those changes in the system or for other goals that they did not achieve in writing at Dayton or Washington. The OSCE and OHR sought in every subsequent election to rework the rules and incentive structures to reduce the influence of the nationalist parties and bolster moderates, with mixed results. Electoral System The electoral system used until the 2000 elections for Bosnia’s various legislative bodies was based on proportional representation, with voting by closed-party list. Voters voted for parties, not individual candidates. This system made it difficult both for reformers within the “nationalist” parties and for “moderate” parties to succeed. First, candidates depended on nomination by their parties, which meant that known reformers within the nationalist parties would have to persuade party leadership to put them on the list. Under normal circumstances, this would mean that while elections might be a manifestation of change, they are unlikely to be its source. However, in Bosnia it is important to consider the role of the international authorities in vetting parties’ candidate lists. We will discuss this in greater detail later. But here it is worth pointing out that parties were forced, especially for the post1996 elections, to choose candidates likely to be approved by the international community or risk having them removed (sometimes accompanied by the loss of those seats for the party). For the 2000 elections, a switch was made to the open-list system, which still left much up to the parties, but at least offered a slight incentive for candidates to try to distinguish themselves as individuals within their constituencies.


Second, each ethnic group essentially voted only for its own representatives. No politician needed the support of anyone from another ethnic group to get elected. Certain offices were structured to ensure that members of a given ethnic group voted only for their own representatives (as in the collective BiH presidency and in the House of Peoples).7 But even where these special provisions did not exist, the market for votes was segmented along ethnic lines. Parties competed for the votes of a single ethnic community. A review of OSCE records reveals far fewer incidents of campaign-period violence and intimidation between members of different ethnic groups. The most serious and systematic intimidation—beatings, arson, bombings—tend to occur between parties fighting to represent the same ethnic group.8 Yet parties representing a single ethnic group had authority over the others when they won office. An SDA-dominated House of Representatives made laws for everyone in BiH, not just for Bosnian Muslims. This exacerbates the existing “security dilemma”: “The ethnic group in power is therefore in a position to dictate to the other ethnic groups in such a way that Bosnians who do not belong to that ethnic group have no political rights.” The electoral system reinforces ethnic divisions because the major parties are organized along ethnic lines: “As a result, it will always be easier and more rewarding for politicians to outbid each other on ethnic issues, rather than to preach moderation.”9 In this constitutional framework, then, the electoral system designed and enforced by the international authorities in BiH was at cross-purposes with the goal of breaking the grip of the nationalist parties on Bosnian politics. Parties competed for votes in a segmented political arena, but once elected they governed in a single one in which the interests of all citizens of all ethnic groups were at stake. In these circumstances, it was in the interests of parties to segment the governing arena just as the arena of political competition was segmented. HDZ maintained its wartime principles of separate administration. Serb parties in RS could agree on one thing, regardless of their other differences—the RS had to survive intact. This brief look at Bosnia’s electoral and constitutional framework illustrates two problems for advocates of institutional design: first, how difficult it is to predict the precise outcomes of the overall institutional framework; and second, how difficult it is to get parties to agree on the “right” institutions at the outset.10 Bosnia’s multiple elections since 1996 represent a continual struggle by political parties and international actors to use elections to shape the definitive and effective terms of Bosnia’s postwar political settlement.

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International Actors We cannot discuss electoral politics in Bosnia without talking about the role of the international authorities there, who have used elections as a tool for reshaping Bosnia’s parties and party system. External actors have been granted tremendous authority by the Dayton Agreement and its later amendments, and they have exercised it to the fullest. The international community spent billions of dollars from 1996 onward on a peace process premised on “hopes that moderate, co-operative Bosnian partners will come to power through elections.”11 International authorities treated electoral competition as a longer term instrument of change, as a way both to redistribute political power and to transform the agenda of political conflict and competition. Specifically, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, the hope has been that successive elections would marginalize nationalist extremist parties and bring moderates to the fore, as socioeconomic issues replaced ethnonationalism as the core voter concern. The U.S. Committee for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), suggested in 1998 that “continuous elections, if held in as free and fair a manner as possible, have been viewed by the international community as a means to bring stability and recovery to a country divided by extreme nationalist political leaders, particularly among the Serb population, many of whom remain in positions of power or influence.”12 Particularly after the first elections in 1996, international authorities sought to effect change in the political system through direct intervention in the selection and dismissal of party leaders and by conditioning parties’ participation in elections on full compliance with the Dayton Agreement. Over the course of the five-year period after the end of the war, the OSCE and the OHR gradually built a legal framework that allowed them effectively to link participation in elections with compliance on key aspects of Dayton, and to enforce these conditions by removing candidates and officeholders of the offending parties.13 As noted earlier, the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords established the Office of the High Representative (OHR) as the “final authority in theater” with respect to the implementation of the peace agreement. In 1997 the OHR was given the power to remove elected officials and candidates from public office or from their party functions if they were judged to be obstructing the peace process. Between 1997 and 2004, the OHR removed or suspended seventy-five elected and appointed officials from public office. Some of those were also banned from holding positions within political parties.14 The OSCE was given responsibility for organizing Bosnia’s elections. Its powers included the ability to vet candidate lists and prohibit participation by candidates seen as hostile to the peace process.


Issues linked to electoral participation by the OHR and the OSCE included compliance with laws on minority returnees and rules banning party leaders and elected officials from sitting on the boards of public corporations.15 Increasingly, to play the electoral game, parties had to demonstrate compliance with a range of different aspects of Dayton that were proving difficult to implement. If the parties wanted to exercise political power, so the argument went, they would first have to demonstrate full compliance with Dayton, as interpreted by the international authorities of the day in Sarajevo. This was true at local levels as well as at entity or Republic levels. At municipal level, the Office of the High Representative devised rules for power-sharing so that all parties with at least 20 percent of the vote were represented in the municipal executive, as well as special power-sharing regimes for particularly problematic municipalities like Mostar, which was divided into a Bosniac side and a Croat side during the war. These kinds of special regimes were supposed to be temporary, to be replaced soon by the entities’ own laws on local self-government. These, however, were long in coming and were still being developed in 2006. Moreover, the OSCE, which oversaw all of Bosnia’s electoral processes and provided the rules and regulations that governed them until 2002, influenced the relationships between local and entity-level government (and between party officials at different levels) by tinkering more or less continually with electoral regulations in an effort to give advantages to non-nationalist parties. Moreover, international authorities have used carrots and sticks to exploit differences within the party leadership and to change the incentive structure facing party leaders as a whole. These efforts opened some space for reformists within the nationalist parties by increasing the pressure on those who would obstruct the full implementation of the political settlement. In preparing their electoral programs and candidate lists, parties had to consider whether or not these would be acceptable to the international community. As noted earlier, parties could also incur electoral punishment for offenses that were either not related or only indirectly related to elections. In addition, Bosnia’s major donor countries used bilateral aid, as well as their influence in the multilateral financial institutions, to gain powerful leverage over post-election government formation, most strikingly in the RS, but also at the state level in the 2000 general elections. For example, international authorities and individual donor countries played an active role in establishing the Alliance for Change, a tenuous alliance of about a dozen parties that succeeded, briefly, in keeping the wartime nationalists out of the executive at state level and in the Federation.16 As a result of such interventions, particularly since 1998, a qualitative shift could be observed in the kinds of people parties could rely on to fill

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leadership positions at all levels, as parties sought to satisfy the demands of international authorities.17 And while shifting “problem” people out of public office by no means implied an automatic decrease in their authority within the party, it had two important effects with the potential to snowball over time, as we discuss in detail later. First, party leaders learned that they would suffer a competitive disadvantage if they selected people for office who would later be removed by the international authorities. Frequent removals, especially of local officials, were disruptive—it is hard to deal with housing issues if the local housing minister is dismissed. Worse, in some cases parties lost the right to the mandate itself, meaning they could not replace this person with someone from their own ranks. Frequent dismissals thus reduced the party’s ability to deliver to its voters, despite the momentarily heightened sympathy it may have gained for the party. Second, the policy of removals created a group of party office-holders with heightened awareness of their dependence on the international authorities’ good graces. Over time, this reinforced the growth of an internal constituency for reform within both HDZ and SDS. Bosnia is clearly an unusual case because of the degree of direct pressure that external actors have brought to bear. Yet while the extent of international power to influence actors’ fates directly is unusual in the Bosnian case, the international role in the majority of post-conflict and African cases is also significant. In many such cases, the donors and the UN have served as a kind of second constituency that politicians must satisfy. In such cases, party leaders must shift from a two-level to a three-level game. The key point here is that international intervention must be considered an integral part of electoral politics, even in an “independent” Bosnia. Environmental Complexity for HDZ and SDS Bosnia has been the scene of more internationally administered elections than any other country. Over the course of seven years, there have been five general elections (1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2006), each of which included sixteen separate races.18 In addition there was a special election for the RS National Assembly in 1997, and three sets of municipal elections (1997, 2000, and 2004) in which polls were organized in more than one hundred municipalities. The 2004 local and 2006 general elections were the first polls to be organized entirely by Bosnian election authorities. Throughout this entire period, the wartime nationalist parties dominated electoral competition. Table 3.1 demonstrates an apparent trend of declining support for the wartime nationalist parties since 1996. Several things are important to note,

82 The Making of Democrats Table 3.1 Entity-Level Election Results for Wartime Nationalist Parties and Their Closest Competitors, 1996–2006 (Percentage of vote) 1996

1998

2000

2002

2006

Parties strongest among Bosniac voters: SDA 54.34 49.21 SDP 7.39 13.65 SBiH 7.35 49.21

26.8 26.1 14.9

32.71 15.55 15.30

25.40 15.38 21.44

Parties strongest among Croat voters: HDZ-BiH 25.29 19.90 NHI N/A 2.96 HDZ-1990 N/A N/A

17.5 1.61 N/A

15.76 1.95 N/A

7.76 2.54 6.47

Parties strongest among Serb voters: SDS 52.31 24.0 36.1 31.19 PDP N/A N/A 13.3 10.73 SNSD 11.5 7.0 13.0 21.79 SRS 6.67 13.11 Banned by OSCE 4.39

18.99 7.13 44.95 3.02

Source: OSCE-BiH, Electoral Commission of BiH. For Bosnian and Croat parties, results are for the BiH Federation House of Representatives. For Serb parties, results are for the National Assembly of Republika Srpska.

however. First, the 1996 results probably exaggerate the actual degree of voter preference for the wartime nationalists, since in that year these parties were able grossly to manipulate the registration process and other aspects of the election to inflate their results. Using 1998 as the base year for comparison, the trend in support for these three parties is less clear, and support for SDS actually increased until 2006. Second, while HDZ has experienced a steady, if small, decline over the course of four general elections, it still thoroughly dominated the Croat vote until 2006. In most years, the combined total of other parties targeting Croat voters has rarely topped 3 percent of the total vote in the Federation. Indeed, up to 2006, SDA and HDZ consistently won pluralities in legislative elections for the entities they have designated as most relevant (Republika Srpska for SDS, and the Federation for SDA and HDZ), as did SDS with the exception of 2002. HDZ won strong majorities in the Croat majority municipalities again in 2004. However, in the 2006 legislative and cantonal elections HDZ gave significant ground to a spin-off party, HDZ-1990, which split the seats won by HDZ-BiH in 2002 in half. Beginning in 2004, SDS saw its dominance slipping in RS, with Milorad Dodik’s SNSD the clear winner of those municipal elections. In the 2000 elections, SDS won control of fifty-five of RS’s sixty-two municipalities. By 2004, that had fallen to a majority in forty-two municipal assemblies and victories in thirty-nine mayoral races.19 SDS’s biggest defeat was in the RS capital of Banja Luka, where the incumbent SNSD received four times as

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many votes as SDS. Perhaps more surprisingly, SDS also lost ground to SNSD in the Eastern Herzegovina city of Trebinje, considered a stronghold of the party (particularly its hardline wing). While the international community has consistently promoted Dodik and his SNSD as “moderates” in terms of nationalist politics, it is now clear that SNSD outflanked SDS in the 2004 election by successfully claiming to be the party best able to defend Serb interests. SDS had also been hurt by the High Representative’s decision earlier that year to block the party’s access to all but one closely monitored bank account, in response to findings by OHR that the party continued to finance indicted war criminals and organized criminal networks. This has made it extremely difficult for the party to transfer funds to and from its branches and has doubtless weakened its appeal. Notably, the declining appeal of SDS has no implications for ethnic integration in RS, where the overwhelming majority of elected officials are Serbs. In Banja Luka, thirty-one of thirty-five municipal council members were Serbs following the 2004 elections.20 The 2006 general elections confirmed SDS’s weak performance in the 2004 municipal elections. In the RS National Assembly, Milorad Dodik’s SNSD got just one seat less than it needed for an absolute majority. In the Federation, the wartime nationalist parties dominated, with SDA gaining twenty-eight of ninety-eight seats in the Federation House of Representatives. HDZ won eight seats. The candidate of Bosnia’s strongest genuinely multiethnic party, SDP, won the Croat seat on the Bosnian presidency, though candidates from the nationalist parties SBiH and SDS held the other two posts. As we discuss in detail later, the slippage by HDZ and SDS in the 2006 elections came from parties that outflanked them on nationalist issues, not from the creation of more moderate competitors. As one local newspaper columnist declared, “the [2006] election, the same as others before it, has shown that within the Dayton Peace Accords mold we are living in, nationalism is simply at a comparative advantage over any other political idea.”21 Returning to the components of environmental complexity identified in chapter 1, we can now offer an assessment of the sorts of external challenges HDZ and SDS faced. Electoral competition poses more of a challenge for SDS than for HDZ, as we discuss in greater detail later. This is directly related to the fact that SDS operates in what is effectively a monoethnic political arena in which it could no longer prevail in electoral competition solely on the basis of claims to be the champion of Bosnian Serb interests. Most parties competing in RS have this claim in common—after the transitional election, SDS needed to offer something more to voters. This changed, however, when talk of ending the


mandate of the OHR again threw into doubt the security of RS’s status. HDZ, on the other hand, has competed in a political arena divided between Bosniacs and Croats and in which the ethnic card is still a very powerful one. Given the weakness of other Croat parties and HDZ’s aggressive efforts to maintain ethnic difference as the most salient issue for Croat voters, the party has faced little threat from interparty competition. The second element of environmental complexity is the existence of multiple political arenas. The existence of local electoral politics offers opportunities for politicians to gain strength to challenge their party’s leadership. In addition, multiple arenas make it more difficult for party leaders to maintain uniformity of purpose on a policy level, and this can cause intentions and outcomes to diverge dramatically. As we shall see, the control of municipal politics is central to the long-term goals of both HDZ and SDS and has presented certain challenges to the leadership of both parties. The last aspect of complexity to be examined here is rule stability. We have seen how, in the case of Mozambique, intensive involvement by international actors has tended to lend a certain degree of stability to the political process, with donors demonstrating a consistent commitment to keep deviations from the established rules of the game within certain boundaries. In Bosnia, by contrast, international authorities have used their power to change the rules of the game in midstream as a tool to affect the behavior of the dominant parties. Before 2004, for example, the length of the term for officials in the next election would only be announced by OSCE shortly before the poll. Moreover, the extent of international actors’ authority in Bosnia tended to beg the question of whether the postwar political rules would outlast these authorities’ presence, thus decreasing rule stability. In short, both HDZ and SDS faced considerably complex environments, with SDS confronting greater challenges in respect of interparty competition. I argue that environmental challenges interact with challenges from within to shape the degree to which a constituency for investing in democratic politics emerges and whether it prevails. It is to these internal challenges to each party that we now turn. HDZ and SDS as Political Parties For both HDZ and SDS, successive elections have provided regular opportunities for divisions within the party to manifest themselves. These opportunities stemmed both from the dynamics of electoral competition itself and from direct pressures exerted by the international authorities in Bosnia. While both parties were subject to interventions by international authorities which were linked to parties’ political participation, more effective international pressure

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on SDS, through the use of both carrots and sticks, has contributed to more dramatic divisions within the leadership of that party. For HDZ, the struggle to define and impose its own interpretation of the postwar settlement has brought internal party changes, but they have been less dramatic and less extensive than those for SDS. Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) The dominant coalition that emerged at the head of HDZ at the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina did not survive through the second general elections, held in 1998. The change in leadership was the culmination of a two-way split within the party, and it revolved around the party’s relationship with its external sponsor and the implications for postwar political strategy. On one hand, there was a division between those who were closely associated with the Tudjman government in Croatia and who were increasingly seen as beholden to President Tudjman and the interests of the Republic of Croatia, and those who sought to break free of Tudjman and the leverage the international community exercised over Bosnian Croats through him. On the other hand, the split represented a rift between those who sought to satisfy ethnic Croat interests within the context of an integral multiethnic state (many of whom hailed from Central Bosnia), and those who sought to maintain separate status and protections for all three ethnic groups within a nominally unified state (many of whom were based in Western Herzegovina).22 HDZ-BiH was, at the beginning, a creature of its initial sponsor, HDZCroatia. As a former minister in the Croatian government put it, Tudjman was “the leader of the [HDZ] parties in both countries, in all possible terms” and saw himself as the defender of Croat interests in Bosnia as well as in Croatia.23 The birth of HDZ-BiH was attended by a team of high-level Croat politicians who flew to Sarajevo from Zagreb for the purpose in August 1990. Tudjman himself appointed the first two presidents of HDZ-BiH, in consultation with leading Bosnian Croats and his defense minister, Gojko S˘us˘ak, himself a Hercegovinian by birth.24 HDZ-BiH was thus inevitably bound up with the goals and strategies of its sponsor. As Croatia’s own interests changed over the course of the Balkan wars, this was reflected in the behavior and leadership of the Bosnian HDZ. For example, for most of the period beginning with the outbreak of war in 1992 until the official end of the Muslim-Croat side of the Bosnian conflict in early 1994, the local leadership of HDZ-BiH rested in the hands of Mate Boban. Boban was a Bosnian Croat nationalist and separatist whose own goals and operating style served Tudjman’s desire to shape the boundaries of the new BiH in accordance with cherished dreams of historic Croatian


sovereignty. As time wore on and Croatia faced the persistent problem of Serb occupation of its territory, Tudjman became more pliable with respect to international mediators who sought to end the war between Croats and Muslims, in which troops and officers from Croatia were intensively involved. The signing of the Washington Agreement, which put an end to the Croat-Muslim conflict in Bosnia in February 1994, marked the emergence of a new dominant coalition for HDZ-BiH. Though Boban—who had spearheaded the conflict with Muslims, the Bosnian Croats’ erstwhile allies against the Serbs—was officially replaced by another figure not so different from him, the locus of power within HDZ shifted out of the party presidency and into the leadership of the self-declared Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna (HRHB), and most importantly its prime minister, Kresimir Zubak.25 The new leadership of HDZ-BiH was just as closely tied to Tudjman as the old. It was, however, more acceptable to international interests. It foreswore human rights abuses carried out during the Croat-Muslim war, emptied detention camps of captured Muslims, and began to go through the motions of setting up the new Croat-Muslim Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as stipulated in the peace accord. The Washington Agreement allowed Croats and Muslims to unite in the fight against the Serbs. Eighteen months later Croat troops, some of whom had up to then been fighting Muslims in Bosnia, reclaimed the Krajina region. Shortly thereafter joint assaults succeeded in pushing Serb lines back from the Krajina to Banja Luka, in presentday Republika Srpska. For many within HDZ-BiH, the Dayton Agreement was a bitter pill to swallow. In their view, it legitimated the Serbs’ military aggression by awarding it an ethnically cleansed and internationally recognized territory, while insisting that the Croats make do as part of a mixed Muslim-Croat entity, in which Croats comprised a small minority of the population. And for some within HDZ-BiH, Dayton amounted to a sell-out of Bosnian Croats by Tudjman, who had signed the agreement on behalf of the Bosnian Croats. Early Leadership Challenges: Integration versus Separation The second general elections, held in 1998, provided the occasion for a second change in party leadership. Whereas the first change represented a shift from hard-line nationalist to more moderate leadership, the second was regarded as a return to more hard-line leadership within the party. The dominant coalition that had navigated the party’s transition from battlefield to political arena was successfully challenged by a rival sub-group from within. The incumbents, led by Zubak, had based their authority on close links to Tudjman and HDZ-Croatia. These links gradually became a liability

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within the party, as the international community put greater pressure on both Croatia and HDZ-BiH to forsake a strategy that would result in greater political or administrative autonomy for Croatia, and to cooperate with other aspects of the international agenda such as sending indictees to the Hague Tribunal. Their rivals for party leadership, led by former Croat army general Ante Jelavić, represented a break with Tudjman’s politics of accommodation with the international community, as well as a refusal to compromise on “the Croat national question” in Bosnia. This group also possessed a number of advantages from the point of view of those who sought to maintain the economic advantages they had achieved in wartime, in the absence of a functioning state in Bosnia. Continued insistence on the Croat question would inevitably mean delays in the constitution of functioning central authorities who could effectively control international borders. Party leaders and supporters with links to smuggling networks and other illegal or quasi-legal economic activities sought to resist the creation of a fully functional state and offered a ready base of support for anyone whose platform promised, deliberately or not, to delay that process. Jelavić ’s election also coincided with changes in the way the party financed itself. Until then, the party and its activities, including attempts to maintain separate Croat self-government by keeping separate accounts even in mixed Croat-Muslim municipalities, had been financed directly by HDZ-Croatia and/or the Croatian government. However, by 1998 Tudjman was under increasing pressure both domestically and from international authorities to loosen the ties. After Tudjman’s death and his party’s loss of national power in the 1999 elections, HDZ-BiH lost a reliable source of funding. Funds continued to come from Croatia, but they were now from individuals, often businessmen with interests in Bosnia.26 With the election of Jelavić and his cohort to party leadership, most of those party figures who had been involved in negotiating the Dayton Agreement left the party. Those, like Kresimir Zubak or Jadranko Prlic, who had been at the helm at the end of the war, argued that the new leadership would end up marginalizing the party and Croat interests in the bargain. They complained that in their zeal to create a Croat entity by maintaining the results of wartime ethnic cleansing, the new leaders were minimizing Croats’ ability to participate fully in the political life of the new state. Calculating that they were riding a sinking ship, they moved to form new parties that were more consistent with the creation of an integrated, functioning state as envisioned in the Dayton Agreement.27 As one former high official of the party noted, “HDZ has become a burden, not only for others, but also for the


Croat people,” because of its refusal to become a full participant in Bosnian politics.28 These internal tensions were soon exacerbated by the loss of financial support for the party from Croatia. In early 2000, HDZ-Croatia lost the general elections and was replaced by a coalition government that was distinctly unfriendly toward suggestions that Bosnian Croats should push for changes in the Dayton Agreement. Croatia, itself looking to find favor with the international community for financial support and support for its bid to join Europe, was in no mood to provide the kind of support lavished on HDZ-Bosnia by its founding patron, President Franjo Tudjman. In addition, by 2001 growing minority returns and the increasing capacity of Federation and central government authorities to regulate cross-border economic activity were beginning to limit both the selective and collective incentives the party was able to offer its followers. Refusal or inability to compete effectively at Federation and state levels would further limit the party’s resources. More than a decade of postwar politics thus saw a reconfiguration of relationships among party elites, with harder line nationalists retaining control over the party leadership through successive challenges. These changes were the result of changes in the way in which the party secured access to resources and changes in the party’s relationship to its external sponsor. Intra-elite relationships within the party were also conditioned by the domestic political environment. Specifically, party elites were divided over how to interpret and how to execute the party’s wartime goal of protection for Croat interests. Participation in electoral politics over time led to the creation of a constituency for more consistent and effective investment in electoral politics within HDZ. However, this constituency repeatedly failed to prevail in its attempts to take control of the party’s leadership or direct party strategy in this respect. On one hand, the segmentation of the electoral arena created by the constitution and reinforced by HDZ’s approach to electoral politics permitted HDZ to continue to appeal to ethnic security concerns. This facilitated the ascendance of ethnonationalist figures, whose platforms were consistently rewarded with high vote shares. On the other hand, direct intervention by international authorities introduced another consideration into the balance. Since international authorities in Bosnia had the power to vet candidate lists and remove both candidates and elected officials who failed to comply with the requirements of the Dayton Peace Agreement, HDZ party officials looking to the long term were likely to consider the international authorities as a constituency whose interests had to be considered. International authorities had the power, at least theoretically, to hamstring the party’s ability to deliver patronage to its activists and services to voters by regularly removing its elected representatives from office. They also had the authority to ban the

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party and to ban particular party officials from public life, should the party fail to comply with the terms of the peace settlement. While the effects have been slow in appearing, intervention by the international community has continued to contribute to intraelite conflict within HDZ. Still, the nature of interparty competition helped mitigate the development of sufficient competitive pressures to force a change in party strategy toward electoral politics. To Invest or Not to Invest in Electoral Politics The rise and fall of HDZ party president Ante Jelavić provides a good illustration of the power of HDZ’s leadership to resist intense direct external pressure to change. Prior to the 2000 general elections, the OSCE declared a change in the way the Federation House of Peoples delegates would be elected from cantonal assemblies. The revision meant that delegates from each ethnic group would need the support of a majority of all cantonal assembly members, rather than being elected only by members of their own ethnonational group as before. In response to the rule change, HDZ officials, led by Jelavić, announced the formation of a Croat National Assembly and called a referendum on Croat national rights within Bosnia on the day of the 2000 general elections. Apparently uncertain as to how to react at the time, the OSCE and OHR let the referendum go ahead.29 In the months after the 2000 elections, however, HDZ’s insistence on “the Croat question” led to an open confrontation with the international authorities. As one Western diplomat put it, HDZ’s reaction to the election rule changes gave international authorities the opportunity to “take down the hard-liners.” Faced with what it saw as the everlasting refusal of HDZ to abandon its policy of undermining joint administration in the Federation, the OHR struck at the party’s financial base in an attempt to force an involuntary abandonment of the policy of separate administration. In a military show of force involving tanks, helicopters, and armored personnel carriers, SFOR troops seized the Hercegovacka Banka, where accounts were kept for the municipalities and cantons that Croats maintained under their control. Leading party figures had shares in the bank as well. The move was seen not only as an attempt to cut off funding for HDZ’s policy of maintaining parallel government administration in Croat areas, but also to strike at the party’s own financial base, including criminal or quasi-legal economic activity. Violent demonstrations followed, in which OHR officials were trapped for hours in their Mostar offices.30 Jelavić, who was at the time also a member of the BiH collective state presidency, and three top party officials were ordered removed by the OHR from their party and government functions. Jelavić and the others were charged with seeking to “undermine the constitutional order of the Federation of Bosnia


and Herzegovina and [the Republic of ] Bosnia and Herzegovina and establish an illegal parallel structure.”31 The party also had ten legislative mandates revoked in core constituencies. Though the High Representative’s order also banned Jelavić from holding any position of authority in any political party, he stayed on as party president in defiance of the ban. Under his leadership, the Croat-majority municipalities and cantons within the Federation declared the establishment of an inter-cantonal union that was to constitute “Croat self-government.” Proponents of the move stressed that this was the only way to draw attention to what they perceived as Croats’ disadvantaged position within Bosnia. As Jelavić put it, “with our political activities in the last few months we opened the Croat national question completely. We warned the international community that the problem exists. Now this problem is discussed in Washington, in Brussels, and elsewhere.”32 The new institutions were of mainly symbolic value, however, and they were abandoned about six months later with little fanfare. For their part, the international authorities adopted a policy of studied disregard of the activities of the outlawed Croat leadership. New Croatnationality representatives from other parties were selected to fill the “Croat” positions in Federation government, and toward the end of 2001, the High Representative let it be known that if HDZ intended to run in elections scheduled for the following year, the party would have to change its leadership to conform with the High Representative’s earlier decision. This occasioned a struggle in the early months of 2002 within the top leadership of the party over whether to comply with the order or abstain from the elections. As late as May 2002, Ante Jelavić remained president of the party. Jelavić supporters maintained that the party should boycott elections rather than bow to what it saw as the arbitrary decisions of the OHR. According to Josip Merdzo, who briefly served as HDZ’s secretary-general during this period, Jelavić ’s faction “realized that if we adopt the decision not to run in elections, it is not necessary to change the leadership” of the party.33 Merdzo and others argued against this course of action: “If we don’t run in the elections, someone else will have the right to say they are responsible to talk about Croat issues, and we are not. If we don’t run in the elections, we get nothing.”34 Though Merdzo was forced out of his position as the party’s secretary-general as a result, his view on elections prevailed. Jelavić ’s supporters, however, were quick to adjust, successfully installing themselves as candidates for the top positions. Thus while tensions reached the level of open confrontation within the HDZ leadership, they left the HDZ leadership and its goals and strategies intact. Nor did the prolonged confrontation with the international authorities

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up to this point have any perceptible effect on HDZ’s electoral strength. In the 2004 elections, HDZ once again won strong majorities in Croat majority municipalities. As a party spokesman put it, “the local elections confirmed that the HDZ is the only legitimate representative of the Croatian people in Bosnia.”35 Culmination of Division In October 2005, Dragan C˘ović, Jelavić ’s successor as President of HDZ, launched a disciplinary proceeding against Josip Merdzo, Bo˘zo Ljubić, and Martin Raguz, citing “breach of party statutes.” The three—each of whom held leadership positions in the party and had been elected to public office as HDZ representatives—had issued a memo critical of party management and calling for the party’s democratization and “a return to the statutory foundations” of the party. It also called for the removal of C˘ović, who later expelled the three from the party.36 The memo had been issued in the context of the party’s performance in parliament. A group of HDZ deputies from the Republic of BiH House of Representatives, including Raguz, had declared their intention to form a “parliamentary coordination group” in response to the inertia of the HDZ leadership. The group complained that it was “facing incompetence as well as lack of interest by the current HDZ leadership for active, creative and clear strategies towards upcoming constitutional changes.” The group also lamented the “nonexistence of timely and clear stands about most important legislative drafts and solutions, as well as violations of HDZ statutes, suffocation of democracy within the party and because of the attempt to break up the Party’s unity by exclusion of important members.” They called upon the HDZ central party board to address these weaknesses.37 The challenge to C˘ović’s authority was backed by HDZ-Croatia and its leader, Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader, as well as by the European People’s Party (EPP), through whom HDZ-BiH had observer status in the European Parliament. Both called for a party convention to replace C˘ović as party president, and the EPP suspended its association with HDZ BiH.38 C˘ović, who had also been accused of using state office to allow cronies to evade taxes, was eventually removed by High Representative Paddy Ashdown. Ashdown later commented, “the Croatian Prime Minister Sanader understood that HDZ should focus on a reformist agenda in the future. This is the only path for nationalist parties in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the SDS and SDA. Bosnia and Herzegovina should follow Sanader’s example. Reformist elements should prevail in all these nationalist parties [emphasis mine].”39 Nevertheless, division within the party about how best to achieve the party’s goals continued to fester. Just over a year after their expulsion, Raguz,


Merdzo, and Ljubić formed their own party, calling it HDZ-1990. 1990 is the year that HDZ was formed, and presumably its addition to the name was meant to suggest a return to the party’s formative principles. Explaining the move, Raguz argued that “the current leadership of the existing HDZ has betrayed democratic principles, has led the party into a sort of international isolation, has lost credibility in the political sense, has given up the party’s statutes and embraced repressive methods.”40 Two of the new party’s founders were members of parliament. One had led cantonal government in a core area of HDZ support. They used calls for more effective participation in democratic politics and governance to champion policies that would move Bosnia away from the Dayton Peace Accord which had provided the country with its constitutional framework. HDZ-1990 gained momentum after C˘ović supported constitutional reform agreements that members of the new party (and members of HDZ’s parliamentary delegation) had rejected. Raguz and his followers opposed the move, saying that it would perpetuate the division of Bosnia into two entities, and they sought instead either the creation of a third (Croat) entity or the elimination of both entities and the redivision of all of Bosnia into cantons.41 Perhaps because of these stances, which won them endorsement from the Catholic clergy in Croatia and Bosnia, in the 2006 elections, HDZ-1990 “bucked the trend established by earlier breakaway parties from the HDZBiH in winning a substantial number of seats at the State, Federation, and cantonal levels.”42 This illustrates the very important point that in the Bosnian context fuller commitment to democratic politics does not necessarily signal a substantive change in party goals. In other words, it does not mean those parties that have decided to invest in electoral politics have become more moderate on, for example, nationalism. Rather, it means that these groups have decided that the best way to achieve their substantive goals is by investing in electoral politics. This point is also critical for an accurate understanding of SDS and electoral politics in the Republika Srpska. Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) Unlike Renamo or HDZ, SDS had to contend with a diffused power structure from the beginning. During the war, locally organized groups often played the leading role in carrying out the party’s policy of ethnic cleansing. Local party strongmen built their authority on control of geographically specific economic resources: the border trade in Bijeljina, the rail network in Doboj.43 In part as a result of international pressure of the kind outlined earlier, the postwar party leadership faced a struggle to restructure the party to

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centralize authority and weaken the grip of certain regional strongmen on party policy. In doing so it faced enormous challenges. The same pressure from the international authorities that made room for these new figures pushed party hardliners into less visible, but often equally powerful, positions in public companies still controlled by the party. Often these positions represent control of local economic resources, which are the source of power for regional strongmen in the first place. Electoralism and Internal Division: Shedding Karad˘z ić Like HDZ, SDS experienced a change in leadership prior to the second postwar general elections. The wartime dominant coalition split in 1997 when Biljana Plav˘sić, then president of the RS and a leading wartime figure in the SDS, publicly broke with the party and eventually formed her own political party, the SNS (Serbian National Union). Plav˘sić’s break with the party leadership, a move strongly supported by the international community, was rooted in her opposition to the role that Radovan Karad˘zić, the flamboyant wartime party president and RS leader, continued to play in the RS. Karad˘zić had been banned from office and party life by the international authorities in Bosnia in 1996. Specifically, Plav˘sić feared that Karad˘zić’s ongoing association with the party combined with his involvement in illegal economic activities would destroy the reputation of the SDS with its electorate and jeopardize RS as a whole. When Plav˘sić moved to investigate companies owned by Karad˘zić and the first postwar president of RS, Momc˘ilo Krajis˘nik, they reacted from behind the scenes by organizing what amounted to a palace coup. Plav˘sić then dissolved parliament and began organizing mass meetings in major RS towns which were critical power centers for SDS. With the help of the international authorities (including SFOR troops), Plav˘sić consolidated her control of the police and media in RS. Her new party won the support of SDS party boards in virtually all towns in western RS, as well as several important ones in eastern RS. Eastern RS had been at the center of resistance to the compromises of the Dayton Agreement, while western RS, including the capital Banja Luka, had long been a more prosperous region and is considered more moderate. Special legislative elections called to reconstitute the RS legislature in late 1997 saw a stunning defeat for SDS with the departure of Plav˘sić. The party lost more than half its seats, though it retained a plurality. Plav˘sić’s move also shook the SDS party hierarchy. While Karad˘zić and other wartime figures were still believed to exercise influence on the party, significant efforts were made to change the party’s public face. The next party conference saw the replacement of wartime leaders with both newcomers to the party and with


old faces who had had a relatively low profile during the war. What set this new group apart was that it understood the need to keep a subtle balance between the party’s two constituencies: voters and international authorities in Bosnia to oversee the peace process. However, the need to keep that balance proved extremely difficult, and SDS finally lost its electoral dominance in the 2004 local and 2006 general elections. In comparison with HDZ, SDS has seen more far-reaching internal change. This is the combined result of two factors: the vital interest of SDS officials in protecting the status of the Republika Srpska, and a decreased ability to exploit an ethnic security dilemma strategy, because the party competes in a political arena where selling itself as the best guarantor of Serb interests does not sufficiently differentiate SDS from other parties. Plav˘sić’s departure from SDS in 1997 threw into relief the party’s major fault line, which coincided with historical socioeconomic differences between eastern and western RS. Most of Plav˘sić’s support came from western RS, more economically developed, more internationalized than the east, and home to the entity’s largest city (and now RS capital, Banja Luka). Plav˘sić’s break with SDS opened the door to the election of Republika Srpska’s first non-SDS premier, Milorad Dodik, the following year. Her party had, by then, lost much of its punch, but the spillover effects of her split from the SDS on RS politics were considerable. First, SDS’s removal from executive power for the first time since the founding of the RS at the beginning of the war removed the entity’s pariah status, and international aid poured in. Indeed, the events of 1997 in RS provided a wedge for far greater direct involvement by the international community in political affairs there. Following the special parliamentary elections, the results of which made forming a majority government nearly impossible, the international community essentially engineered the appointment of Milorad Dodik as Prime Minister. Dodik, whose party, the SNSD (Independent Social Democratic Party) held only two seats after those elections, was viewed by the international community as a moderate with sufficient nationalist credentials to be effective. Under Dodik’s administration, international advisers stepped in to restructure the RS financial system, tighten up fiscal “leaks” and improve government revenue collection. They pumped aid into the system and even helped the government pay the salaries of teachers and other civil servants. It is not by accident that more aid went to western RS, where much of Plav˘sić and Dodik’s support was based, than to eastern RS, though the latter is the poorer part of the entity. The international community also pushed RS toward greater cooperation with the central state institutions of Bosnia. The United States offered $10 million in direct budget support on the condition

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of unified customs tariffs with the Republic of BiH. When, following the 1998 general elections, the RS National Assembly struggled to form a new government, donors “made it clear to the RS government and Assembly that economic and financial aid depended on Dodik remaining in power.” Five new World Bank projects were announced, budget support was procured, and the 1999 donor conference produced $400 million in new funding for RS.44 The new SDS leadership was eager to shed its image as a nationalist party in the eyes of the international authorities. Party president Dragan Kalinić argued in 2001 that SDS, and Serbs more generally, had gradually come to accept BiH and Dayton, largely because they believed RS was secure. According to Kalinić, “Earlier, our strategy was to send to Sarajevo our worst cadres. Those who only made trouble, those who knew very little, those who did not want to see state institutions function. That was the logic. It was like the earlier strategy not to allow return of refugees. Now the picture is changed . . . because now we see that very frequently we defend Banja Luka in Sarajevo. . . . There are gradually stronger and stronger feelings among Serbs that there is no alternative to living in BiH on the basis of the Dayton Agreement.”45 At the same time, SDS certainly did not want anyone else to be able to take over that mantle in the eyes of voters. As Kalinić pointed out, “I cannot allow now that [Mladen] Ivanić’s party [PDP, the Party of Democratic Progress] or Dodik’s party [SNSD] try to be the standard bearer ˘ selj’s radicals [SRS, Serbian for [Serb] national interests, or that [Vojislav] Se˘ Radical Party] do so. . . . [T]herefore we have a balanced approach between national, economic, and social aspects.”46 Accordingly, SDS’s electoral slogans in 2002 retained a nationalist tinge (“Let’s Vote Serb”). However, in the end SDS was outflanked by Dodik’s SNSD on the nationalist appeal.47 The Rise of a Constituency for Electoralism ˘ avić, who became president and vice president Dragan Kalinić and Dragan C of the party in 2000, respectively, represented the reform wing of the party. They sought to reduce the influence of regional party strongmen who still controlled economic assets gained during the war, as well as that of hardliners who sought to disrupt the settlement as a whole. The reform wing of the party wanted to create a more centralized party structure in which the central leadership had greater authority over the direction the party would take.48 This was not an easy task, but the reformist leadership faction seeking to consolidate its power over rival factions successfully used intense pressure from international authorities to help achieve its goals. Two examples help to illustrate the point. In 2001 the head of SDS in Doboj, the control center of the RS railroad network and one of the regional SDS strongholds, had been


removed from office by the international authorities. He pressured the party to allow him to run for office again, but the party refused. He threatened to cause chaos for the party unless he was appointed director of railroads, and so he was nominated for the position. The international authorities disallowed his appointment, however, thus taking the heat off central party officials.49 Second, the reform wing successfully argued that only by playing by the rules could the Republika Srpska be preserved, and to play by the rules, SDS needed the reform-minded leadership this faction claimed to represent. Kalinić used this line of argument to justify overriding the opposition of a sizeable minority of his party’s parliamentary delegation on reforms to the RS constitution, reforms which had been mandated by Bosnia’s constitutional court and which would ultimately be enforced by the OHR if they were not voluntarily adopted.50 This resulted in the departure from the party of some of these deputies, who accused the SDS of having gone soft and formed their own rival parties. The ascendancy of the reformist wing was consolidated at SDS’s party conference in March 2002, which resulted in significant turnover in middle levels and significantly revised the party’s statutes and program to make it more consistent with the spirit of the Dayton Agreement.51 The leadership of the reformers was further buttressed by the party’s strong performance in the 2002 general elections, in which the party again won a plurality of seats in the RS legislature and overwhelmingly defeated rival candidates for the RS presidency. While the internal changes in SDS were fairly significant, as the ruling party and the former party of Radovan Karad˘zić, SDS still faced tremendous pressure from the international community over outstanding aspects of Dayton—notably the failure of RS authorities to turn over a single war crimes suspect in eight years. As a result, in June 2004, SDS party president Dragan Kalinić, then president of the RS National Assembly, was removed from both positions by High Representative Paddy Ashdown. The decision cited “a complete, even criminal absence of proper control designed to ensure the observance of the law and to prevent the passage of funds to and from criminal and war criminal networks. . . . There are also indications of financial links between the SDS and extremist groups.”52 The OHR also moved to block all SDS bank accounts in an effort to cut financial support for Karad˘zić and others.53 In September 2005, SDS withdrew its support from the BiH government (at Republic level), where it had been part of the majority coalition in the House of Representatives.54 The party was angered over its coalition partners’ unwillingness to join in SDS’ protest against widening financial sanctions on the party by the OHR.55 The freeze on the party’s bank accounts was lifted in

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October 2005, after international authorities deemed that the party had begun to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). SDS had surrendered eleven people wanted by the ICTY. However, the OHR continued to withhold a significant amount of the party’s budgetary support for 2005 (about $300,000), noting that it would be released if Karad˘zić were turned over by the end of the year. He was not.56 These financial sanctions took their toll on the party, though the discovery of large caches of money in Doboj and elsewhere suggested that SDS had continued to find ways to finance itself and its most important branch offices.57 The cost to the party was not only financial, however—the sanctions heightened internal divisions within the party over the degree to which SDS should cooperate with the international authorities on several aspects of the Dayton Accords, including the further integration of the Bosnian state. For example, in November 2005 a delegation of SDS members represent˘ c’s resignation. According to a stateing Eastern Herzegovina called for Cavi´ ment released by the delegation, “the SDS representatives from the eastern part of RS are displeased with the party activities and conduct of Chairman ˘ c. Our discontent reached its culmination after C˘avić gave the green light Cavi´ for police reform [a longtime demand of OHR].”58 Shortly thereafter, the RS National Assembly failed to pass the RS government’s budget, precipitating a crisis of confidence in the government. Dodik’s SNSD took the lead in the National Assembly to oust the ruling SDS-PDP coalition government that had been put together after the 2002 elections. The new government was a coalition of several smaller parties led by the SNSD. The SDS refused to join the governing coalition, and Milorad Dodik was selected as prime minister. Thus isolated and financially hamstrung, and with four of its leading members facing trial on embezzlement charges, SDS limped toward the 2006 general elections. The party faced sanctions from the international authorities, but these were in addition to loans in arrears with Priredna Bank which ˘ the party still needed to pay off. Mirko Sarovi´ c, previously the Serb member of the BiH collective presidency, was among those in court on embezzlement charges and for “financing a network supporting runaway war criminals.”59 These problems took their toll on SDS in the 2006 elections. Dodik and his SNSD prevailed in the polls in part by campaigning hard against compliance with several of the international authorities’ demands regarding Republika Srpska calling, among other things, for a public referendum on independence for Republika Srpska. The High Representative noted that there was much talk of independence for Republika Srpska amongst Serb parties and, correspondingly, demands for the elimination of Republika Srpska from Bosniac- and Croat-dominated parties. He noted that “the parties that


employed the most vociferous rhetoric during the campaign were also the biggest winners: the Alliance of Independent Social Democrats (SNSD) of RS Prime Minister Milorad Dodik and the Party for BiH (SBiH) of newly elected Presidency member Haris Silajd˘zić.”60 In an interview given after the elections, RS president and SDS party president Dragan C˘avić suggested that the SNSD had outflanked the SDS on the nationalist question in 2006: Dani: You told me before the interview that many foreign diplomats have asked you why you did not go with a radical nationalist rhetoric which Dodik used.

˘ c´: I do not have the right to change the platform that SDS convention has Cavi adopted, and that platform is our political future and represents several key promises. One is that BiH is a country, and entities are part of it. . . . Here we have people who are frustrated with the consequences of the war, and I think it would be wrong to manipulate their emotions. Dani: Don’t you think you have paid the price for the modernization of the party and the removal of the wartime legacy in these elections?

˘ c: I have to be honest with you—yes I have. I do not regret any of my decisions Cavi´ because those have been supported by the SDS. This is for me the victory of the SDS and the victory of the mind. I hope that SDS will soon finish the process of development into a serious, organized, modern, rational European people’s party.61 ˘ c was ousted Following the disappointing results of the 2006 elections, Cavi´ from the party leadership and the new leaders promptly set about ensuring that it would not be outflanked on ethnic appeals again. According to the High Representative’s May 2007 report, “The SDS has now reverted to the intransigence of its earlier days, but it is unlikely to be able to outflank Dodik in this regard. The newly elected SDS leadership has nevertheless been openly flirting with former SDS officials removed [by the OHR] for support of ‘Persons Indicted for War Crimes.’”62 SDS’s experience shows how pressures from international authorities ended up counteracting electoral pressures on SDS to broaden its electoral appeal beyond ethnic nationalism. Demands for more progress on prosecuting war criminals associated with SDS in wartime ultimately undermined the reformist leadership of the party.

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Changes in Party Approaches to Competition Having examined in some detail the internal challenges brought on by electoral politics over time in each party, we now compare and contrast the two parties’ approaches to electoral competition over the period from 1996 through 2006. As noted earlier, for both SDS and HDZ, international actors constituted an important constituency in addition to the voting public, an audience that had to be appeased or courted. Over time international pressure drove a wedge into hairline fractures in the dominant coalitions of both HDZ and SDS. The wedge has gone deeper and has had more visible effect, however, in the case of SDS. This is due to the fact that Republika Srpska gives SDS a stake in the existing political settlement agreed at Dayton. Because the survival of RS is seen as essential to Serb national aspirations and to the survival of the SDS as a party, party authorities have been more vulnerable to leverage by the international authorities over their actions at local level. This international pressure has conditioned relations between elites within the party and has affected the party’s ability to use obstruction of unpopular Dayton provisions, like minority returns, as part of its campaign platform. Entity- and State-Level Politics: HDZ HDZ’s strategy toward the postwar political system has been defined by its leaders’ insistence that Croat national interests have been poorly served by the Dayton Peace Agreement. Within its own ethnic bloc, for most of the postwar period HDZ’s vote shares remained stronger than those of either of the other wartime nationalist parties. HDZ leaders themselves argue that this is largely due to the continuation of the “security dilemma” for Croats in Bosnia more so than for other ethnic groups. As one local HDZ leader lamented, “SDS and SDA [the Muslim-based Party of Democratic Action] have achieved their goals so they have no reason to exist. SDS has the Republika Srpska. SDA did an even better job—they produced a majoritarian system, and this electoral law [the rule changes of 2000] made Croats a minority without influence on the federal level. Serbs received an entity and Muslims received an entity, and Croats are amorphous.”63 The security dilemma is worth exploring, because it provides an interesting point of contrast between the wartime nationalist parties. The leadership of both HDZ and SDS have long maintained that stronger central state institutions constitute a threat to the collective security of their national group within the state. Since, in the unsegmented political arena of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbs are less than 50 percent of the voting


population, a stronger central level government puts Serbs in the position of being governed by their former military rivals. This is unacceptable to SDS, and to most other Serb parties. Although there is now power-sharing between Serbian and Bosniac or Croat parties at municipal level in RS, these municipalities are located in an entity called the Republika Srpska and are subject to legislation passed by that entity’s national assembly, which is still dominated by nationalist and Serb parties despite new constitutional regulations on formal representation of all three constituent peoples.64 For Croats, the situation is markedly different. Croats share power at all levels in the Federation with Bosniacs, who are the majority both in the entity and in the Republic as a whole. Within the Federation, power-sharing rules at one level are reinforced by power-sharing at higher levels. From the Croat nationalist point of view, the constitutional framework provides no shelter for the preferred strategy of trying to segment the political arena, as it has for Bosnian Serbs. HDZ’s pursuit of a political arena in which it is guaranteed to be a majority has led it first to prioritize cantonal and municipal government, and second, to redraw the boundaries of those cantons and municipalities in which Croats are not a majority, by maintaining separate administration in those areas. While HDZ and SDS have the same goals (i.e., segmenting the political arena into ethnically defined units), the constitutional peculiarities of Bosnia have, perhaps ironically, led SDS a little closer to endorsing the political settlement and have led HDZ into the political and diplomatic wilderness. HDZ has sought to maintain the political segmentation not provided for in the constitution by preserving the administrative arrangements developed during the war, in the form of the Croatian Republic of Herceg-Bosna (known by its Croatian acronym, HRHB). HDZ has sought to govern unmolestedin those municipalities and cantons (or those parts of municipalities and cantons) which have a majority of Croat citizens. Within a single municipality with mixed Croat and Bosniac populations, they maintained separate systems of municipal administration, separate pensions, separate budgets and revenue collection, and wherever possible physical separation from Muslim areas.65 The maintenance of separate administration was both an instrument of patronage for HDZ and a way to retain electoral relevance. In maintaining separate administration, Croats argued forcefully that federal institutions are not prepared to provide the services that Croat authorities were so effectively providing. They warned that Bosniac authorities were not prepared for the transition to a market economy, that the Sarajevo-based pension scheme would collapse if it were given responsibility to administer the pensions

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now provided from Mostar (the “Croat capital” of Bosnia), and that Bosniac government authorities had low capacity to collect and budget revenues.66 As long as HDZ authorities can control functions such as these, the reasoning goes, the party retains relevance for the local electorate even if appeals to ethnonational security begin to dim. However, the fact that HDZ’s electoral performance was consistent at entity and Republic level but falling at cantonal level may suggest that this strategy is not sustainable over the longer term.67 Still, with the ability to maintain separate administration regardless of electoral outcomes or constitutional restrictions for most of the postwar period, HDZ had little incentive to change its political strategy with successive elections. However, over time, conditionally linking electoral participation to compliance with other aspects of the peace process has forced the party to adjust some of its tactics. Entity- and State-Level Politics: SDS The challenges of postwar electoral competition for SDS were different from both HDZ and Renamo in one important respect: the collective incentives that had mobilized followers during wartime were not sufficient to sustain an electoral base after the war, as they were for both Renamo and HDZ. This is because, in the Serb Republic, the primary wartime goals of the party had been achieved. In Republika Srpska (RS), it seemed at least at the outset that the Serbs had achieved their wartime goal of an ethnically cleansed Serb entity. RS was to be one of two entities which together would, theoretically at least, form a fairly minimalist Bosnian Republic together with the other entity, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although SDS has remained the predominant party in RS in terms of votes received at all levels, the party found that it soon had to move beyond appeals to ethnic security concerns as the sole message. Given the glacial pace of progress on creating the institutions of the Bosnian Republic (and considering that Serb leaders themselves could influence the pace of that process), the Serb national project seemed assured. Moreover, all of the Serb parties in RS were agreed on the importance of this project, though they disagreed on methods, so that this was not a salient political cleavage after the war. Finally, economic issues loomed large. To make a credible claim to offer a solution to RS’s economic crisis required maintaining a cordial working relationship with the international authorities, which provided further incentives for giving appeals to ethnic solidarity a lower profile. As party president Dragan Kalinić put it, “I think that in the 2002 elections, only the parties that have economic goals as their priorities can win the election. I don’t believe


that the protection of national interests can be the main topic anymore. . . . [I]f we want to protect SDS we must change our party.”68 Playing on ethnic security fears was an increasingly less effective strategy for internal RS politics. As Casperson points out, even during the war “The SDS’s dominance was not primarily a reflection of its effectiveness in playing the ethnic card, its ability to tap into extreme mass sentiments; it was contingent on a number of other factors, most importantly the party’s control of non-political resources.”69 In sum, because SDS entered an electoral arena in which the wartime political cleavage was moot, ambitious leaders had to broaden their message and identity to win elections. This exacerbated pressures on the party’s dominant coalition and added momentum to struggles between rival elites whose interests lay in shedding the party’s wartime image and those who sought to cling to the selective and collective incentives they had relied on during the war. Local Politics In Chapter 1 I argued that multiple political arenas made it more likely that challenges would arise from within parties, as the need to compete in elections in different contexts (such as local versus national levels) would promote the formation of groups within the party who had both a strong stake in re-election and distinct ideas about how best to achieve that goal. Thus we would expect to see an increased incidence of internal conflict within parties that must compete in local elections in addition to national level elections. This expectation is partially borne out in Bosnia. At the entity and Republic levels of governance, SDS more assiduously adapted to the game of electoral politics than did HDZ. While HDZ openly declared its opposition to electoral outcomes and procedures, SDS party leaders were somewhat more accommodating in that regard. And while HDZ’s breakaway parties moved more toward the center and advocated greater cooperation with the international authorities and Dayton, politicians splintering off from SDS have generally done so in protest at the party leadership’s accommodation toward Dayton. Interestingly, however, both parties have used local politics as a reserve domain of power. Both parties have tended to offer greater resistance to international pressure at local level than at national level. SDS leadership has used its control of politics at the local level to help mitigate some of the internal costs of accommodating the pressures of international and electoral pressure at national level. Troublesome party activists could be safely and comfortably installed at municipal party headquarters,

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where they were likely to attract less attention. HDZ, for its part, has used local political arenas to reinforce the hard line it has taken at the national level. In Bosnia, decentralized electoral politics was a central part of the peace agreement. The establishment of municipal government was part of a complicated constitutional formula that sought to balance wartime territorial gains, claims for collective rights and a certain degree of ethnic self-determination with the ambition to create an integrated, multiethnic state that could ultimately conform to European standards on the treatment of nationalities, among other things, and remain at peace. Nevertheless, the political leaders of two of the three warring groups (Croats and Serbs) consistently sought to use decentralization to enshrine territorial autonomy for their ethnic group, while the international authorities overseeing post-conflict state building countered this tendency by building in integrationist rules and incentive structures for the parties. Despite these integrationist efforts, however, party leaders have successfully controlled local politics and prevented it from introducing significant change in either internal party dynamics or interparty relations. Local political dynamics in Bosnia, in other words, have tended to mirror higher level political dynamics, whether we look within parties or at the party system. In El Salvador, on the other hand, local politics has had a greater impact on parties and the party system, as we shall see in the next chapter. Because municipal politics plays an important part in the strategies of HDZ and SDS, it is necessary to discuss briefly the basic framework of local politics in each entity. In Bosnia, decentralization takes a different form in each of that country’s two constituent entities, the Serb Republic (RS) and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH). As described earlier, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is comprised of a minimal central government with oversight of defense, international trade, and the like. It acts as a loose coupling device for the RS and FBiH, each of which performs most of the functions of any ordinary central government. In RS, directly elected municipal governments with some degree of legally guaranteed fiscal and administrative autonomy constitute the local level of government, with the entity-level government acting essentially as the central government for those municipalities. The division of responsibilities between municipal and entitylevel government in RS has been somewhat fluid over time. In the Federation, ten cantons form an additional layer of government between the entity’s central government and the municipalities. Both municipal and cantonal governments are directly elected and have specific functions and revenue sources. Here, the cantons are the level of government with which municipalities have to negotiate budgets and areas of shared or


exclusive competency, though these are spelled out to some degree in the entity’s constitution and in legislation like the law on local self-government, as in RS. Up until the local elections of October 2004, Bosnia’s municipal governments were elected in a parliamentary-style system that employed a complex formula for proportional representation. Voters chose among party slates, and parties were awarded seats in the municipal assembly in proportion to the votes received. The majority party then formed the municipal government, subject to certain power-sharing rules. As of the 2004 elections, mayors have been elected directly. Also before 2004, the rules on power-sharing were not uniform across all municipalities, but were devised by the international authorities in Bosnia to deal with particular problems in specific municipalities that had been heavily affected by ethnic cleansing or that had been divided under wartime administration by parties representing different warring groups. However, the 2004 laws on local self-government in both entities attempted to standardize the rules for representation in the municipal executive of all ethnic groups whose councilors win more than a certain percentage of seats in the assembly. Cantons in the Federation control both the budgets and the allocation of responsibilities (beyond certain ones that are spelled out in the constitution). Croat and Bosniac nationalists have used cantonal government in support of a consistent strategy to carve out separate spheres of influence for themselves. In the Federation, municipalities have been a key tool to resist the practical (physical, administrative, financial) reintegration of local communities. This is also true in the RS municipalities. However, in the RS, the municipalities have had to carry less of the burden of this policy, as this has been for political purposes at least a monoethnic entity for most of the postwar period. Though SDA has long had a small share of the seats in the RS legislature (the RS National Assembly), the Serb parties have had the luxury of having their “own” entity to administer. Municipal governments were unlikely to feel any pressure from entity government to adopt policies conducive to refugee return, whereas in the Federation, entity-level government was comprised of Bosniacs and Croats, both of whom had interests in maximizing their control over particular local areas, as well as conflicting local policy interests. Bosniacs and Croats in the Federation had to find a way to split the difference while appearing to be cooperative at the Federation (and BiH Republic) level. The practical division of power was worked out at cantonal and municipal level, on a case by case basis. The Serb Republic required no such compromises at entity level, and municipal governments found it easy to adopt the attitude that prevailed among their superiors—Serb Republic for the Serbs.

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HDZ and Local Politics HDZ’s strategy toward the political system rests, as already noted, on its ability to carve out political arenas it can dominate. For this strategy to work, HDZ must retain control of what its local and cantonal party boards are doing, because it is local-level control that permits HDZ to sustain the polarization of the electoral arena around ethnonational identity. Therefore it is worth looking in some detail at HDZ’s behavior with respect to cantonal and municipal government. As noted earlier, HDZ has maintained separate administrations in mixed Croat/Bosniac cantons. As the international authorities have tinkered with the rules on local government to clamp down on such practices, HDZ has continued undaunted. But doing so has required the central party hierarchy to maintain rigid control of local and cantonal officials and has exacerbated the existing tensions within the party between militants from Central Bosnia, who have tended to be more sympathetic to the idea of an integrated Bosnia and Bosnian state, and those from Western Herzegovina, who have manifested a more consistently separatist bent. This section offers examples of the party’s approach to political institutions at local level. Ethnic politics in the Federation city of Mostar is even more complicated than elsewhere in Bosnia. Mostar, a city divided by the war between Bosniacs and Croats on either side of the river that runs through the middle of town, was governed by a special power-sharing regime devised shortly after the peace agreement was signed. This temporary agreement divided the city into six municipalities, which were divided between Bosniacs and Croats. The next task was to unify the city, a task for which a special commission (one of several known as the Mostar commission) was appointed in 2003. Creating a unified Mostar involved not only streamlining all of this duplicate administration, but also unifying schools, with the most high profile being the Mostar Gymnasium. Up to 2003, Mostar’s premier secondary school taught Bosniac and Croat students in separate sessions, using different teachers, with each ethnic group undertaking its own administration of their school within this same building. In September 2003, the HDZ party presidency gave instructions to its cantonal ministers of education to implement its program on the preservation of Croat culture and educational institutions throughout the Federation, in defiance of orders from the international community that local institutions, including schools, be integrated. This decision was taken at the meeting of the HDZ presidency in September and then backed by the Mostar municipal board in a separate session. Not all HDZ local party boards


immediately agreed to toe the party line, but they were eventually successfully pressured to fall in line. By October, cantonal and municipal governments in key Federation areas had been effectively paralyzed by this issue. In a number of instances even before the September decision was taken, cantonal and municipal officials from HDZ refused to go along with decisions to integrate local schools (which until then had had separate facilities or sessions for Bosniac and Croat students), saying that they had no authority from higher authorities in HDZ to do so.70 An OSCE field report captured this phenomenon in a nutshell, saying, “for fear of strong international community sanctions the party [HDZ] officially does not obstruct reform. Actual resistance however is left to the lowest level, [as for example] the ‘hard liners’ activity’ and the teachers’ strike.”71 Teachers went on strike in Canton 7 shortly after the ruling on school unification was announced, in what was widely believed to be an effort orchestrated by HDZ. Such central party board declarations were also sometimes used by municipal elected officials for their own purposes, even without explicit instructions from above. As one OSCE field officer put it, “more nationalist HDZ officials use this confusion [over the central party board’s initially unclear position on school unification] to justify a suspension of the process [of integration]. At the same time, in the current climate of uncertainty, the more moderate local HDZ officials are unwilling to take any positive step towards administrative unification for fear they could possibly be acting contrary to party policy.”72 Cantonal government formation was routinely subject to the approval of HDZ’s central party hierarchy, particularly where power at the cantonal level was to be shared between two or more ethnic groups. Said the OSCE official responsible for Canton 6 in January 2003, three months after the elections, “The discussions between HDZ and SDA for the formation of Cantonal government in Canton 6 are still ongoing, waiting for higher levels of decision [within each party].”73 Canton 6, for many years under special power-sharing regime, routinely took much longer than other cantons to form a government once election results were in, but in no case was government formation speedy. Or, as another implementation official from OSCE put it, at cantonal levels, formation of government is linked to “computations with appointments at higher levels of government. It is not always the case that higher level posts are most coveted. Control and power remain superior to service.”74 Party leaders seek to control the agenda of political competition, keeping inter-ethnic conflict and competition high on that agenda. But they also look to control of financial assets to retain political control. Positions on the

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boards of state-owned companies are as desirable, or more desirable in some cases, than positions in government. For both HDZ and SDS, obstruction at a local level was clearly a strategy of the central party hierarchies, even if there was not always slavish obedience from local party officials. In Canton 7 (Hezeg-Neretva canton), home of the unofficial Croat capital of Mostar, cantonal government was boycotted for weeks in Fall 2003 by the Bosniac ministers, who argued that the canton’s (Croat) prime minister was not responding to their needs. This conflict, however, was apparently linked to one at Federation level, in which Croat politicians blamed their Bosniac counterparts for failing to consider Croat needs. Thus, since Croats feel Bosniacs treat them cavalierly where they dominate at Federation level, Croats will govern without regard for Bosniacs in Canton 7, where Croats are in the driver’s seat.75 It is also, however, linked to the SDA’s opposition to the elimination of the special regime in Mostar, which carefully balanced power between Bosniac and Croat political leaders. Fearing a loss of power in Mostar, the SDA sought to maximize its leverage within cantonal government.76 One example highlights the degree to which these local-level struggles could be explicitly linked to struggles between parties at the central level. On November 7, 2003, the OSCE’s field representative noted that “the SDA walked out of a long-delayed [local] assembly meeting because the Croats proposed that the Bosniacs’ language be officially referred to as ‘Bosniac’ rather than ‘Bosnian.’ They want the High Representative to intervene on their behalf.”77 The question of what to call the language of Bosniac citizens of Bosnia had previously been the source of similar episodes of paralysis in the entity-level working groups on constitutional reform and in the RS National Assembly. Thus, in this instance, the SDA used an issue that resonated at higher levels of politics to try to advance its position locally. In this case, the SDA took a hard line in the defense of Bosniac culture and language, to demonstrate that it is the one true defender of Bosniac interests in the face of ethnic chauvinism by the Croats. This, it hoped, would help to bolster its waning political power in the face of challenges from parties like SDP or SBiH, which had lesser credentials as defenders of the ethnonational group, but which had successfully challenged SDA on economic and other issues. SDS and Local Politics SDS leaders were at the helm of a party in which, historically, power has been more decentralized. Local politics in RS were even more of a redoubt of the party’s hard-line elements than Federation sub-entity politics were for HDZ. Party leaders have often used this history of decentralized power in SDS as an


excuse for a failure to meet the international authorities’ expectations of reform. For example, a special audit review by OSCE noted that the SDS president in Banja Luka “does not verify the financial records or activity of 62 SDS municipal offices around the country. . . . [H]e went further to say that SDS municipal offices are ‘independent legal entities’ and Banja Luka SDS Main Office does not control the functional and management structure of its senior SDS leaders throughout Bosnia.”78 According to the International Crisis Group (ICG) a number of indicted or indictable war criminals hold formal or informal positions of authority within political parties from their municipal bases. For example, Mirko Blagojević, a paramilitary leader allegedly involved in the ethnic cleansing of Bijeljina during the war, was the vice president of SRS, and the party’s failure to remove him was one of the reasons it was banned from the 2000 municipal elections. Others who held positions of power during ethnic cleansing operations (including chiefs of police or commanders of paramilitary units) are now members of municipal police forces, municipal assemblies, ranking party officials in SDS or SRS, and officials in public companies. Milan Ninković, president of SDS for Doboj during the war as well as Minister of Defense for Doboj, was named by Human Rights Watch as one of the five main organizers of ethnic cleansing in that municipality. He sat on the municipal assembly until the OSCE removed him but remained president of the local SDS organization and is believed by some to be the power behind the elected mayor. Ninković retains commercial assets that were sold to him by SDS in February 2004.79 The Director of Customs in Doboj is also suspected of war crimes, having been president of the municipal assembly as an SDS member in 1990, and remained in that position. ˘ c sought to centralize control of the party, the Even as Kalinić and Cavi´ SDS central party hierarchy was obliged to shift a certain amount of power within the organization both to the geographical periphery and from political to economic control, in response to the international authorities’ efforts to change the party’s behavior. SDS, like HDZ and the Bosniac SDA party, appropriated state assets in their areas during the war. These included not only state-owned industries, but also pension funds and utilities. Entity governments in both the Federation and the Serb Republic were slow to respond to international pressures to privatize these assets. And when entity officials grudgingly moved to try to return these assets to state control, they were often met with resistance by local party officials. In Trebinje, for example, in eastern RS, the High Representative eventually had to remove the leadership of Elektroprivreda (EP), the electric power utility, following an audit which showed that EP was not returning all of the revenues collected to the municipality

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for transfer to the entity-level government. After the removal of EP leadership, the OSCE implementation officer for the region reported that “part of the local SDS leadership is trying to defend the removed conservative-nationalist and very influential former EP management, spreading doubts about the auditor’s report and standing up against privatization.”80 This dynamic exacerbated the effects of the tendency for central leaders of SDS, like their HDZ counterparts, to pay lip service to the international authorities’ demands at central level while obstructing at local level. As one OSCE field officer noted in Eastern Herzegovina, home of the hard-line faction within SDS, municipal governments formally adopt international community–recommended procedures on more inclusive local governance and establish bodies for the implementation of these procedures, “while at the same time trying to sideline and block the work of those same bodies. While looking great on paper, in practice all initiatives are blocked by bureaucratic provisions and lack of support by the mayor and certain interest groups inside the municipality.”81 The possibilities for blocking advances at the local level are myriad. Whether in Srebrenica (RS) or in Drvar (Federation), where electoral politics has, mainly through the mechanism of absentee voting, succeeded in getting ethnic minorities into positions of power at municipal level, such advances have subsequently been stymied by SDS or HDZ. This has been achieved in a number of ways—whether by higher-level officials using direct mechanisms at their disposal, such as the control of municipal budgets, or by putting pressure on local party officials, or by local officials’ own initiative and with the tacit or explicit support of higher levels of government. The 2000 municipal elections in Srebrenica brought to power a Bosniac mayor, through the efforts of a returnee group that organized itself as a political party and relied heavily on the support of absentee voters registered in the municipality. Srebrenica was the scene of one of the worst massacres in the Bosnian war, with at least 7,000 Bosniac men and boys slaughtered by the Bosnian Serb army during one particularly horrific episode of ethnic cleansing (July 1995). Eight months after the elections, OSCE field reports by the officer responsible for ensuring that election results were implemented noted that “the continuous obstruction of the RS government towards the decisions taken by the multi-ethnic administration of Srebrenica risks undermining the progress achieved in the municipality, discouraging the authorities from taking further action towards the creation of a sustainable multiethnic society.”82 In June 2001, the Bosniac mayor and assembly members of Srebrenica were still unable to live full-time in the municipality. Bosniac authorities attempting to return had been burned out of their homes repeatedly that spring.83


In Drvar in 2003, where a returnee party succeeded in gaining the right to representation in municipal government, the members of the executive (the mayor, heads of various departments) from different parties never met or spoke. In Stolac in 2001, Bosniacs won the right to representation in municipal government but then were not allocated specific job responsibilities or given facilities to do their job, nor given a hearing on any issue by the mayor. A visit to the municipal offices found all Bosniac government officials huddled in a single room on the ground floor of the municipal building, without electricity, telephone, office supplies, or furniture other than a few wooden chairs brought in from elsewhere, while their Croat counterparts disposed of the entire second floor, which was fully equipped with all the necessary amenities. Much of the literature on decentralization and democratization suggests that there may be a positive relationship between the two. Decentralization is expected to provide opportunities for new leaders to gain a platform to challenge incumbent party leaders. As we see in the case of Bosnia, while local electoral politics may give scope to additional party leaders, this is not necessarily a good thing. Municipalities are not in this instance incubators of responsible governance. Instead, what we see in Bosnia is a consistent pattern in which centrallevel party officials use local government as a place to obstruct policies that they do not want to implement but have little power to resist openly at the central level. The fact that local officials are elected provides them some cover for this tactic, though not enough. It is clear that although there are strong local party boards within the HDZ, the SDS, and the SDA, local politics is not the main driving force behind internal tensions within these three parties. Instead, rival factions at the center use local issues to push their own agendas, with varying degrees of success. Thus, instead of local government serving as fertile ground for policy innovation or at least pragmatism, for the recruitment of new kinds of party adherents, or for the emergence of a new breed of leaders, it has enabled the wartime nationalist parties to block initiatives for change. When moderate or innovative leaders emerge, they are often silenced or removed by their parties. The goal of these parties is to consolidate their wartime gains by carving out spheres of influence over which they can maintain control. This means, in practice, continuing to carry the banner of ethnonationalism and preventing the broadening of the political agenda to issues that cross-cut identity, most importantly for Bosnia economic development. Local politics in Bosnia helps leaders of both SDS and HDZ to play the three-level game.

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Conclusion For both SDS and HDZ, participation in electoral politics over time brought new internal cleavages and in some cases deepened old ones. These tensions were exacerbated in fundamental ways by pressure and direct intervention by international authorities overseeing the implementation of the Dayton Peace Agreement since 1995. One important point that emerges from this chapter is that changes in the internal distribution of power within HDZ and SDS, while substantial over the course of more than ten years, did not lead in the end to a reordering of the political agenda. More importantly, neither did it lead to a greater commitment to the rules of the political game, the underlying constitutional order. Instead, the dominant parties embraced, to a greater or lesser extent, the use of electoral politics to advance factional agendas. The degree to which parties embraced Dayton, which lays out the country’s postwar constitutional framework, depended entirely upon the extent to which doing so was necessary for party leaders to balance the dual imperatives of maintaining their positions at the head of their parties, and competing successfully against competitor parties. Thus if a constituency within a party, or the party’s leadership, manifests a growing commitment to electoral politics, this should not be taken as an indication that its substantive goals have changed. We can see this in both HDZ and SDS. The success of SNSD in ousting SDS from representation in entity- or state-level politics in 2006 led to a successful overthrow of the ˘ c had replaced the party’s harder line leadership party’s leadership. Just as Cavi´ by arguing that the party had to adapt to international and electoral pres˘ c himself was ousted by rivals in the wake of defeat by SNSD. That sures, Cavi´ party, once a favorite of international authorities craving a “moderate” gov˘ c’s SDS by appealing to nationalist interernment in RS, had outflanked Cavi´ ests. The underlying mechanics of party response to challenges has not changed—party rivals are empowered by shocks that make the current leadership look like a liability. SDS, whose leadership used the electoral imperative to oust hard-line nationalists unacceptable to the international community, were later outflanked by another Serb party that, as an opposition party, had greater freedom from pressure by the international authorities and was able to champion anti-Dayton causes that the SDS had been obliged to eschew. HDZ’s only significant competition for the Croat vote, HDZ-1990, was created by longstanding HDZ legislators and cantonal officials who were able to use the visibility and resources their offices afforded them to create a basis of support for themselves among HDZ voters. Like their SDS counterparts,


they argued that existing party leadership was not up to the challenges of competing successfully in interparty politics. In both cases, the dynamics of inter- and intraparty competition brought about challenges from internal rivals. In the case of HDZ, the most successful of these challenges led to a rival party that managed to halve HDZ’s seat share in the next set of general elections. In the case of SDS, the challengers managed to take over party leadership. That leadership, however, was subsequently overthrown by another internal challenge in the wake of an unprecedented electoral loss for SDS in general elections. In each of these cases, the challengers to incumbent party leaders invoked the need to compete more effectively in inter-party competition. And in each of these cases, challenges to party leaders occurred according to decision-making rules and procedures which these parties had previously established. The fact that serious challenges to party leadership occurred within the parameters of these formal rules itself is evidence of their institutionalization as parties. The fact that these challenges occurred, in large part, in response to the imperatives of electoral competition, compounded by direct pressure by international authorities in charge of implementing the Dayton Agreement, demonstrates that these parties are committed to electoralism and to the basic rules and procedures that underpin democratic politics. Interestingly, what they are clearly not committed to is Dayton itself, as the 2006 general election demonstrates. Until then, though Dayton was much scorned from many political corners, the continuous, open-ended presence of the international authorities had placed limits on it as a political issue. Open discussion by the international community about the possible departure of the last High Representative, tentatively scheduled for June 2007, had removed these limits. Suddenly, SDS’s old wartime appeals to its base were in demand, but by this time the party had shifted its identity and its leadership to broaden its base. Its position as ruling party had subjected SDS to the need to compromise on issues of Serbian national interest many times over the years. As a result, the SDS was outflanked by an opposition party that had begun life in multiparty politics as a moderate on national questions but whose leaders had seized upon the possibility of systemic change—with the potential departure of the final High Representative—as an opportunity to champion a hard-line nationalist agenda that SDS could not plausibly claim at that time. The question in Bosnia is no longer whether the dominant parties are committed to electoralism. They are. This bodes well for the survival of democratic politics in Bosnia, provided Bosnia itself survives as a state. However, this raises a second question that bears directly on the issue of

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democracy as a basis for constructing sustainable postwar polities. Bosnia perhaps represents the outer limit of what electoralism—or democracy for that matter—can do to bring about substantive change in the practice of politics. In the final analysis, democracy is a set of rules and procedures that may ultimately be accompanied by values that help to institutionalize those rules and procedures. However, as Rustow recognized, democracy may be of limited value in bringing substantive change on fundamental issues.

Figure 4.1 Country Map of the Republic of El Salvador

CHAPTER 4

El Salvador: Local Elections and Change in the FMLN Introduction

W

hen the civil war in El Salvador drew to a close in 1992, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) confronted the challenge of forging a single coherent political party from a broad front comprised of organizations that were started in different parts of the country, had drawn their initial support from different social sectors, and had distinctive ideological approaches and methodologies. The FMLN’s constituent parties had also retained separate command structures throughout the war. Its first task on moving to the political arena was to sort out how these differences could be accommodated in a single party. As it turned out, they were not. Two of the five constituent organizations left the front before the transitional elections in 1994, as discussed later. The remaining organizations comprising the FMLN have succeeded in increasing their coherence under a single-party umbrella. But the shift from guerrilla activities to peacetime politics yielded an enduring rift within the party that revolved in part around the relative importance of winning office and emphasizing the party’s ideological distinctiveness. As we have already seen, over the course of repeated elections, efforts to win elections may result in challenges to a party’s ruling coalition from within. Participation in elections often creates differences of opinion among ambitious elites seeking electoral wins. We might expect this to be particularly important in candidate-based elections for the legislature or for local office. For the FMLN, which faces candidate-based elections in legislative as well as municipal elections, pressure on the party’s strategy for appealing to a voter base came from competition both in national elections and in


municipal politics. The former provoked an intense and polarizing debate within the party over which broad ideological tendency to highlight and how to present the party both to voters and to an international audience. The stakes of this struggle were raised by El Salvador’s economic vulnerability to its powerful northern neighbor. U.S. diplomats did not hesitate to make known their concerns over Schafik Handal, a leader of the party’s orthodox tendency, a founder of El Salvador’s communist party and the party’s 2004 presidential candidate, when he announced that if elected, “we will implement policies and take measures to replace the neo-liberal model from abroad” and reverse dollarization and privatization.1 While each election at the national level has been preceded by conflict between the party’s “orthodox” and “reformist” tendencies, these battles within the national party leadership have not produced a clear reorientation of the party’s identity at the national level. Municipal elections brought about more marked experimentation in the party’s pitch to voters and stiffened the challenge to the party’s national leadership. Notably, the most important challenge to the orthodox tendency, which is at its root a conflict over party identity and priorities, has been led by the FMLN’s local elected officials. The Context of Electoral Competition in El Salvador Historical Overview In January 1992, the FMLN and the government of El Salvador put an end to twelve years of civil war by signing the Final Agreement on Peace in Mexico City. Calls for negotiation began just a year after the FMLN was formed, but attempts to initiate dialogue between the government and the FMLN failed repeatedly over the next eight years.2 The peace accords were the culmination of regional and UN-brokered efforts to settle Central America’s civil conflicts, efforts which benefited from the sudden irrelevance of ideological proxy wars that accompanied the end of the Cold War in 1989. The civil war was the culmination of decades of economic inequality and brutal repression by a narrow elite based on the power of large landowners in alliance with security forces. The role of the military was central in this period. By the early 1930s, “the military had established itself as the arbiter of politics.”3 In 1979, a group of military officers launched a coup against the government, calling for political and social reform. The coup was followed by the successive establishment of short-lived military governments, each with increasingly diminished civilian participation. Popular mobilization on the left was accelerated by the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in March 1980 by right wing death squads.

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In October 1980, five leftist political organizations came together to forge the FMLN. The five constituent parties of the FMLN were: the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS), the Popular Forces for Liberation (FPL), the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), the National Resistance (RN), and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (PRTC). As we discuss in more detail later, these parties were marked by ideological differences as well as by differences in strategy. The FPL, for example, sought to mobilize workers and peasants in a long-term strategy of popular war. The ERP, by contrast, was made up of younger middle-class members and was broadly seen as less ideological. The ERP was responsible for the assassination of one of El Salvador’s leading Marxist intellectuals, Roque Dalton, in 1975. This prompted the exodus of a number of ERP supporters, who formed the RN, an organization which privileged political action and kidnappings over bombing and assassination. The PRTC was a small party comprised mostly of University of El Salvador students.4 In these early years, the FMLN was, in McClintock’s words, “an unwieldy coalition of quarrelsome groups” whose ranks were swelled at least as much by popular revulsion toward the regime as by any positive attributes of its own. Nevertheless, the FMLN succeeded in developing mechanisms for dealing with internal conflicts and “when peace negotiations finally began, the FMLN’s long-standing experience with consultation and argument stood the movement in good stead.”5 Beginning in 1982, as part of a U.S.-led effort to legitimate its support of the Salvadoran government against a leftist insurgency, the Salvadoran government sought to give new credibility to electoral politics. A new constitution was drafted in 1983, and the United States gave generous support to the electoral campaign of Christian Democratic candidate José Napoleón Duarte. Elections were at first shunned by the left, who argued that they were meaningless in the context of gross human rights abuse prevalent in El Salvador. While the intensity of military and paramilitary attacks on the opposition had declined somewhat after the drafting of the new constitution in 1983, political violence against civilian activists continued at high levels throughout the 1980s. After Duarte’s election, however, the FMLN was able to begin exploring political options in a limited way. McClintock writes that “the opening of political space enabled the FMLN to carry out political work in Salvadoran cities again. . . . Between 1984 and 1989, the FMLN successfully renewed its political networks in San Salvador and other cities.6 FMLN commanders began openly to discuss the possibility of participating in elections.


Before the FMLN ended its armed struggle, another party on the left entered electoral politics. CD (Democratic Convergence), a coalition of three small parties based mainly in San Salvador and led by, among others, Rubén Zamora, contested the 1989 election and won 3.5 percent of the vote.7 The FMLN had laid out a set of conditions for its own participation in those elections, including proposals for electoral reform. When these were rejected, the rebel group responded by sabotaging those elections to an even greater extent than they had done in past polls.8 Nevertheless, the 1989 elections were sufficiently credible that they had a positive effect on the FMLN’s calculus to continue its struggle exclusively in the political arena. This was followed by the FMLN’s November 1989 offensive on San Salvador, along with coordinated attacks on seven other cities, which were collectively conceived as a final push to achieve power by military means. Although the attacks were repelled, they demonstrated that the Salvadoran government could not achieve military victory, just as they made clear to FMLN militants that military victory was similarly out of their own reach. The killing of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her young daughter at the University of Central America by a U.S.-trained unit of the Salvadoran military in the wake of the offensive also led the U.S. government to seek to distance itself from its erstwhile protégé. This helped to focus the attention of the Salvadoran government on the negotiation option. As Karl points out, “the November 1989 FMLN offensive changed the balance between hardliners and soft-liners on both sides, but especially on the right.”9 Terrified by the FMLN’s ability to infiltrate even the affluent zones of the capital and chilled by the post-offensive reprisals of the government, Karl writes, “El Salvador’s economic elites—fearful that the army could no longer protect their homes, that officers had become involved in corrupt activities and that their government was becoming an international pariah—began to desert the armed forces they once sustained.”10 In April 1990, UN Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar agreed to oversee the brokering of a peace settlement. By July a first partial accord had been reached, followed by another compromise in October. In that same month, the U.S. Congress cut military aid to El Salvador in half, providing further impetus to the Salvadoran government to forge ahead with compromise. In March 1991, legislative and municipal elections were held in El Salvador without the interference of the FMLN, which declared a ceasefire for the vote. The CD again contested these elections, improving its vote share from 4 percent in 1989, its first electoral outing, to 12 percent of the legislative vote in 1991.11 In April, the National Assembly revised the constitution

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in accordance with the agreement hammered out so far. These changes signified an agreement to transform the role of the armed forces in El Salvador— to subject it for the first time to effective civilian control and to limit its role to external defense rather than the maintenance of internal law and order.12 Shortly after the signing of the peace accords, rebel commanders returned to El Salvador and a commission was formed to oversee implementation of the peace accords (COPAZ). The country’s first postwar elections were held in 1994. In postwar elections, the FMLN has done particularly well at municipal level and has reached parity or better with ARENA in terms of legislative seats, while the presidency has remained out of reach. There were five sets of municipal and legislative elections in El Salvador from the end of the war through 2006: in 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, and 2006. Presidential elections were held three times in that period: in 1994, 1999, and 2004. Results of presidential elections are shown in Table 4.1, legislative in Table 4.2, and municipal in Table 4.3. The first postwar elections in 1994 were swept by ARENA at all levels— municipal, legislative, and presidential. This changed in 1997, when ARENA Table 4.1 Presidential Election Results for ARENA and FMLN, 1994–2004 (Percentage of vote) Party

1994

1999

2004

ARENA FMLN

49.3 25.6

51.96 29.4

57.7 35.6

Source: Keesing’s Record of World Events, World News Digest

Table 4.2 Legislative Seats Won by ARENA and FMLN, 1994–2006 Party ARENA FMLN

1994

1997

2000

2003

2006

39 21

28 27

29 31

27 31

34 32

Source: Keesing’s Record of World Events, World News Digest. There are 84 seats in the legislature in total.

Table 4.3 Municipalities Controlled by ARENA and FMLN, 1994–2006 Party

1994

1997

2000

2003

2006

ARENA FMLN Other parties combined

200 15

161 54

127 77

106 74

147 59

47

47

58

82

56

Source: Keesing’s Record of World Events, World News Digest. There are 262 municipalities in total.


lost control of 25 percent of the municipalities it had won in 1994 and the FMLN won San Salvador with a coalition candidate for mayor, as well as eight of the fourteen departmental capitals. The position of mayor of San Salvador is highly visible, some say the second most visible in the country, and has been a springboard to the presidency of El Salvador in the recent past (for former presidents Duarte and Armando Calderón Sol). While some observers argued that the FMLN could not have won the capital on its own, the party did just that in 2003, after the incumbent, Hector Silva, pulled out to run for the Legislative Assembly for the centrist coalition that had nominated him for mayor of San Salvador. The FMLN retained control of San Salvador in all three subsequent elections. As Table 4.3 illustrates, since the 1994 elections the FMLN has consistently won a sizeable minority of municipalities across the country. This includes the mayoralties of many of the municipalities comprising San Salvador, as well as several other major cities. For this reason, simply comparing the number of municipalities won by ARENA and the FMLN does not fully capture the significance of the FMLN’s presence in municipal politics. In the wake of the 1997 vote, roughly 48 percent of Salvadorans lived in areas governed by FMLN mayors.13 Following the 2003 elections, the FMLN governed in nine of the country’s ten largest urban areas, in terms of population and economy.14 This included the nation’s capital, where nearly onethird of the country’s population now lives, and the capitals of eight of the fourteen departments. The FMLN has tended to win in urban areas, while ARENA garnered more support in the rural areas. In Nejapa, the FMLN mayor has been elected to four consecutive terms, and the mayors of Nejapa, Santa Tecla, and other large municipalities have emerged as the leaders of the FMLN’s moderate wing, which has posed significant challenges to the old guard. Clearly then, the FMLN and ARENA are the two dominant parties. Still, there are a handful of parties that consistently win a small number of municipalities and/or seats in the legislature, and given the near parity of the FMLN and ARENA, the smaller parties are increasingly important as coalition partners within the legislature. After the 2006 elections, for instance, neither party could prevail without forming voting alliances with one of the consistently represented smaller parties—the PCN (National Conciliation Party) on the right, or the PDC (Christian Democratic Party) or the CD (Democratic Convergence) on the left. The PCN is consistently the third-place party in the legislature, winning on average just under thirteen seats in each election from 1997 to 2006. The PDC is a consistent but fairly distant fourth, winning on average around five seats in the same period.

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Constitutional Framework and Party System El Salvador is a presidential, unitary state. It has elected municipal government, but departmental governors are appointed. Legislative and municipal elections are held concurrently every three years, with presidential elections every five years. The legislature is comprised of eighty-four seats, and members are elected from multi-member constituencies corresponding to the country’s administrative departments. Though the FMLN’s performance in legislative elections has improved steadily over the years, ARENA’s alliance with a smaller rightist party kept the FMLN (at least until 2006) from controlling the legislative agenda. The FMLN has not yet managed to win the presidency and consistently pulls in a substantially lower share of the vote than does ARENA in presidential polls. Thus municipal government offers the FMLN its most important opportunities to pursue its policy agenda, demonstrate competence and other desirable qualities to voters, and gain a stake in patronage opportunities afforded by access to the state. Moreover, some have argued that municipal elections have spillover effects for national elections. According to an analyst cited in La Prensa Gráfica, “for the political parties, the municipal vote has a catalyzing effect on national votes. According to the political logic, to have a good mayor or to present a strong candidate there will add votes for deputies. That is to say that people vote in a cascade effect, or rather, for the same party.”15 The party’s gains at municipal level have substantially and steadily increased. Control of major urban areas has given the FMLN high visibility and broad impact on people’s daily lives. It has also engendered tensions and changes within the party leadership, as we discuss later. Given the importance of local governance on the dynamics of FMLN’s internal party politics, we need a brief exploration of the structure and role of municipal government in El Salvador. Municipal government existed in El Salvador for much of the twentieth century, though a formal municipal code was not established until the mid-1980s. Even after the municipal code was passed, it played no significant role in governance, as municipal governments were short on both financial and political resources. This changed with the end of the war however. During the war years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had sought to improve the ability of local governments to provide for the needs of citizens, as part of a counterinsurgency strategy. After the war, the challenges of reconstruction were enormous; records and infrastructure had been totally destroyed in some areas, and it became clear that municipalities had to be significantly bolstered and play active roles if reconstruction was to proceed. Reconstruction funds were channeled through municipal government.16


Decentralization in El Salvador now consists of directly elected municipal governments with legal provision for fiscal and administrative autonomy. Mayors and municipal councils are elected every three years on a party slate under a winner-take-all system, which results in highly disproportionate relationships between votes won and municipal councils gained by each party. There is no provision for opposition participation in municipal government. The country’s municipal code spells out specific responsibilities for municipalities, but there are a number of areas in which responsibility is supposed to be shared between municipal and central government, and in many of these areas there is still a good deal of ambiguity about who is responsible for what. Nor is the division of responsibility always consistent from one municipality to another. In El Salvador, unlike Bosnia, decentralization is not an attempt to provide territorially based autonomy for any particular group or to address problems related to the war. Municipal elections had been long established, but problematic. El Salvador held regular municipal and general elections for most of the twentieth century, but elections were not truly competitive for much of this period, and the few competitive contests left much to be desired in terms of fairness, transparency, and respect for the rule of law.17 Parties in postwar El Salvador initially saw municipal politics as unimportant and concentrated on winning presidential power and legislative seats. Gradually, however, over the course of several elections, they came to understand that the performance of municipal governments could be an important selling point for the party. The involvement of municipal governments in rebuilding human and physical infrastructure, in addressing issues of social and economic inclusion and integration, and in encouraging citizen participation in governance raised the importance of municipal government as an arena which party leaders could use to further party goals. Environmental Complexity for the FMLN From 1994 through 2006, the FMLN operated in an electoral environment that, as in Mozambique, was polarized around the ruling party and the former armed rebel movement. As ARENA and the FMLN have maintained near parity in terms of their legislative representation, smaller parties such as the PCN (National Conciliation Party), PDC (Christian Democratic Party), or CD (Democratic Convergence) play an increasingly important role in tipping the scales toward one camp or the other.18 Like Renamo, FMLN’s voter base has remained fairly stable, as many people see the FMLN as the only viable alternative to ARENA. However, unlike Renamo, the FMLN was a front comprised of five different parties, who

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retained their identities and hierarchies throughout the war. Many of the challenges the FMLN faced at the onset of its participation in electoral politics had to do with the need to forge a unified party out of this broad front. Electoral contests from 1994 on in El Salvador have reflected this process. Each presidential election after 1994 was preceded by the creation of another party by a breakaway faction from the FMLN. At municipal level, the FMLN has engaged in selective electoral coalitions with some of these parties, including the United Democratic Center (CDU) and the Social Christian Union (USC). In terms of our first measure of environmental complexity, environmental competitiveness, the FMLN faces greater challenges than Renamo or HDZ, but less pressure than SDS. The voting bases of Renamo and HDZ are secured both by ethnic polarization carried over from the war years and by the dearth of viable challenger parties. The FMLN has a clear identity forged in wartime that provides it with a solid base, and it was still perceived by many, fourteen years after the peace accords, as the only viable opposition to ARENA. But the presence of competent smaller parties capable of splitting the vote at the legislative and municipal levels forces the FMLN to think strategically about its electoral platforms and about potential coalition partners in these contests. As for HDZ and SDS in Bosnia, in El Salvador the existence of multiple electoral arenas has been important to the FMLN’s approach to the postwar political system. In Bosnia, municipal government proved useful for the national leadership of both parties, who sought to use it as a reserve domain of power that helped take off some of the pressure coming from international authorities. They also used positions in local government and economic enterprises as side payment to party figures who had fallen out of step with whatever image the party sought to portray at the central level. On the other hand, local-level officials often had agendas of their own for which local office proved useful. These included challenges to the party’s leadership (Merdzo of HDZ is a good example here) as well as challenges to the rules of the political game. Similarly, in El Salvador municipal government has provided a springboard for challenges to the party’s national leadership, as we discuss later. With respect to the third element of complexity, rule stability, El Salvador has not been subject to the kind of international oversight experienced by either Mozambique or Bosnia. International actors played an important role in the transition from war to peace but have been less involved, at least since war’s end, in directly or indirectly enforcing the rules of electoral competition. One important exception is generated by the country’s heavy economic dependence on the United States, whose representatives have not hesitated to


voice their preferences for election outcomes. This perhaps adds a measure of uncertainty to presidential contests by creating a sense that the country cannot “afford” to allow the FMLN to win the presidency, and therefore that outcome would be blocked. For example, outgoing Salvadoran President Francisco Flores said, in June 2003, that if the FMLN were to gain power, “many people will lose their jobs, since investments will start being withdrawn from El Salvador,” and that the country’s relationship with the United States would sour.19 FMLN as Party As has already been noted, the FMLN’s first task on moving to the political arena was to sort out how the differences between its five constituent organizations could be accommodated in a single party. As it turned out, they were not. Two of the five constituent organizations (ERP and RN) left the FMLN just after the transitional elections in 1994. Their departure was in part a result of the struggle over who should be the party’s presidential candidate in 1994, and in part went back to wartime tensions between the leadership of the FPL and Villalobos, leader of the ERP.20 This development only hinted at the daunting challenges that lay before the FMLN as it tried to find a workable formula for allocating power and authority within the party and for negotiating a party identity that all of the factions could support. In this first instance, the FMLN followed the conflict management mechanisms adopted during the war. Spence notes that for the 1994 legislative elections, the FMLN’s newly elected political committee chose candidates “on the basis of historic command positions in the guerrilla [organizations] and from the top down in formulas assuring that each of the five groups would get their appointed quotas of candidates. Departmental candidates were selected by departmental committees of the party where historic roles were debated against current performance in new kinds of tasks. Thus being a good guerrilla leader or underground operative did not guarantee selection as before.”21 In short order after the first elections, the FMLN began to develop a clearly identifiable internal fault line between an orthodox tendency and a reformist tendency. This in effect divided the party between two party “types” in terms of goal orientation: vote- or office-maximizing and ideology- or policy-maximizing. The reformist wing was comprised at the beginning primarily of members of the PRTC and those members of the ERP and RN who remained in the FMLN after those two organizations left the party in 1995. The reformist wing has been pragmatic and concerned with winning elections right from the outset, and has favored an open approach to

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coalition-building with other parties, as well as pluralism within the party. The orthodox wing has been dominated by members and leaders of the Communist Party of El Salvador and the FPL. It has hewed more closely to the principles of socioeconomic justice and the notion of “democratic centralism” and strict adherence to party ideology.22 Wade argues that the initial differences between the FMLN’s constituent parties have remained influential in intraparty politics. These differences are not just ideological, but organizational. “The divisions within the FMLN are pronounced and have been couched in ideological terms, i.e., reformist versus orthodox. Yet to frame the FMLN’s divisions solely in terms of ideology would be erroneous. Because each of the five organizations maintained their own leadership and organizational structure throughout the war, the leadership of various organizations had little experience at the art of compromise— or power sharing for that matter.”23 She maintains that the earliest source of tension in the postwar FMLN was between the FPL and ERP over who should lead the FMLN legislative bench, and that once the ERP left the party shortly after the 1994 elections, the struggle within the party shifted to one between reformist and orthodox tendencies. However, though this division broadly split leaders and militants along the lines of the FMLN’s constituent parties (with the Communist Party and FPL on one side and the PRTC, ERP, and RN on the other), it did not stay that way. By 1997, Spence argued that “competition for posts within the party and for candidacies do not seem to have taken place along the party lines of the three groups, but between individuals and about issues. There is a substantial turnover in the FMLN bench.”24 Rubén Zamora argues that the FMLN’s two tendencies—orthodox and reformist—hold two competing notions of the party’s identity.25 For the orthodox wing, the model is the “mass bureaucratic party,” in which a clearly identified social sector constitutes the loyal electoral base of the party, the leadership is preeminent and vertically incorporates the militants. The party is financed by member dues and party activities. For the moderates, on the other hand, the “professional electoral” model is more apt. In this model, party professionals play the dominant role, and the party is oriented toward elections. Links with social sectors are accordingly weak and shifting, conforming with the need to win elections. The party is financed through links to interest groups and state subsidies, rather than through members’ dues. The cleavage between the reformist and orthodox wings is thus multidimensional and captures different practical orientations toward electoral politics, ideological differences, power struggles between the leaders of the constituent parties, and differences of opinion over the identity of the FMLN as a political party. The reformist–orthodox division was sharpened with each


election. This dynamic was intensified by the fact that El Salvador’s staggering of presidential elections and legislative and municipal contests meant that there was a major electoral contest on average every two years between 1994 and 2006. National Politics and Internal Party Dynamics While each election at the national level occasioned conflict between reformist and orthodox tendencies, corresponding in part to tensions between the FMLN’s constituent organizations, these battles within the central party leadership did not produce a marked reorientation of the party’s identity at the national level. The party remained, following the death of Schafik Handal in early 2006, in the hands of the orthodox wing. These conflicts did, however, provoke repeated internal struggles over the soul of the party and produced multiple breakaway parties led by former FMLN militants. In 1997, for example, divisions between ideological moderates and the party’s orthodox wing came to the surface when Facundo Guardado, from the reformist group (renovadores as they were known at the time), was elected to the party leadership. Following the 1999 elections, in which Guardado ran as the FMLN’s candidate for president and lost, Guardado resigned from the party’s top leadership post. In 2000, he and a number of renovador deputies were expelled from the party altogether after they voted with ARENA in the legislature in favor of dollarization and free trade policies. In 2002 he formed his own party, the Partido Movimiento Renovador (PMR).26 Guardado said that his split with the FMLN was rooted in his belief that the party had been captured by “a small group of fanatical leaders” who were unable to lead the party to electoral victory.27 The next challenge to the party’s orthodox wing came from Oscar Ortiz, a former member of parliament and incumbent mayor in one of the country’s largest municipalities, Santa Tecla. Ortiz argued that Handal and his orthodox cohort failed to understand that selling the party as a socialist party in national elections conjured images of Cuba in the minds of some voters. “Some leaders of the Front still haven’t learned anything about connecting the party’s discourse to the consciousness of the people. . . . Whoever best resolves the problems people have, will win the confidence of the people. The ideological values are important, but I cannot first sell the ideology and then sell the solution.”28 Rubén Zamora has written that, despite the FMLN’s history as a front comprised of different ideological tendencies, “the detonation of the division” with the FMLN came not from ideology but from “a legislative vote or an internal election.”29 The divisions within the FMLN, he argues, have had

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to do with the ways that the party generated and allocated power. He cites the first split, when ERP and RN left the party demanding more autonomy for the constituent organizations of the FMLN. The second split (1999) was not, according to Zamora, over a change in ideology even though it coincided with the moderate tendency led by Guardado having gained the party leadership position. Instead, it was over a change in the way authority was allocated within the party. In 1998, the FMLN instituted primaries for the party’s presidential candidate. This had the effect of exacerbating divisions within the party: “The introduction of internal primaries decentralized the party leadership and began the process of adjudicating quotas to sectors in the party [women, youth, etc.].” Zamora notes that as a result “the local assemblies were converted into spaces of confrontation between political tendencies [within the party], sometimes violent ones.”30 At the subsequent national convention in 1999, no party succeeded in obtaining the required qualified majority, and in the end the party chose its coordinator as its 1999 presidential candidate, Facundo Guardado. The process, Zamora argues, was damaging to the party: “Rather than generating a participative democratic experience, greater polarization was created within the party and a serious deterioration of the national image of the FMLN resulted.”31 The same was true, he argues, of the primaries in 2001 and 2002. In 2000, municipal, departmental, and national collective party bodies had been empowered to hold primaries to select party and public officials at all of these levels. When the orthodox wing once again gained control in 2001, they put limits on what they called these “democratizing modifications.” They revived party cells (comites de base), trotted out old rhetoric (“the sacred phrases,” in Zamora’s words), and imposed restrictions on internal party primaries for party positions and for candidates for public office.32 They added provisos permitting the national leadership to screen candidate slates. As the next section makes clear, many of the concrete changes in internal party governance and campaign strategies came as a result of pressure from the FMLN’s “party in public office” group: the FMLN’s elected mayors. Local Politics and Internal Party Dynamics: The Rise of the Mayors One implication of municipal elections is that municipal office may become a launching pad for higher public office or for advancement within the party, as noted in chapter one. This may well threaten existing power-holders within the party, forcing them to adapt to new competition by accommodating or expelling challengers.


Campbell points out that national parties have indeed begun to see local office as an important springboard to national office throughout Latin America. He maintains that, in those countries where decentralization has occurred, “anecdotal evidence suggests that local executive office became more important than the legislature, and, depending on the size and importance of the city, more important than a governorship in relation to moving up the political ladder of higher office.”33 Since decentralization was first instituted across a large number of countries in the region, six former mayors have become presidents or high national officials. This, Campbell argues, is because “the opportunities created by decentralization have made it possible for local officeholders to establish a record as doers. Local office has become a platform for action.”34 As a result, party leaders may become more attentive to the kinds of candidates running for mayor. They may come to see mayoral candidacies as a perk to be bestowed on their own key supporters; or they may turn to more rigorous methods of choosing candidates to maximize the party’s chances of winning. Either way, the existence of local electoral politics affects the allocation of resources within the party. And precisely how it does so can tell us a good deal about the party leadership and its intentions. In many cases, democratic local governance has increased the opportunities for individual politicians as well as for parties. In his broad study of decentralization in Latin America, Campbell notes that local elected office has attracted highly qualified and committed candidates previously excluded [at other levels, before decentralization] from public office because of tighter controls on candidacy by political parties. “Decentralization offered new leadership a chance to serve.”35 This finding is echoed in eastern and central Europe. Baldersheim and his colleagues, for example, found that 70–75 percent of local councilors elected after 1989 were new—they had not been members of the old regime, and they were more highly educated and younger than before. Similarly, party membership and religious beliefs were found to be less important for voters than good local knowledge and conflict resolution skills.36 The existence of local electoral politics can also have the effect of multiplying voice and exit options for individual politicians, by providing them with opportunities to garner voter support and financial support independently of the party hierarchy. Faced with the need to court local interests and bolstered by government revenue sources (and opportunities to negotiate with private sector and donors), local politicians have both incentives and opportunities to part ways with party doctrine. Christopher Sabatini notes that, in the Andean countries, “in local elections, individual leaders were able to present themselves as an alternative to the traditional parties by

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emphasizing local issues and their distinction from national elites.”37 These findings clearly resonate in the case of El Salvador. With each municipal election in El Salvador since the end of the war, the FMLN has consolidated its control of the country’s major urban areas, including most of the municipalities making up the capital city of San Salvador. As a result, by 2004 there were a number of second- and third-term mayors who had gathered experience, visibility, and a following through their positions in major municipalities. This group drew explicitly from their experiences in local government to call for reform both in the party’s internal structures and in the way the party presented itself to the public. They argued that reform in the party’s internal decision-making structures, to include candidate selection for all levels, was essential to leading the party to electoral success. This moderate wing, led by FMLN mayors of large municipalities, called for internal democracy within the party, and specifically for a larger role in party leadership for the new generation of leaders that had cut its teeth in municipal government and parliament. They argued that their experience in municipal government made them uniquely qualified to guide the party to electoral victory. “We are a very important group of men and women who have demonstrated how to work efficiently,” said Ortiz of his supporters, among them mayors of San Salvador, Quezaltepeque, Apopa, Mejicanos, and Santa Ana. “Of course I support the strengthening of this tendency that more and more talented cadres should hold positions of responsibility in the Front.”38 Increasingly, those with experience at the local level began to gain influence in the party. Concrete changes in party governance won by this group—which formed the core of the FMLN’s reformist wing after the departure of Guardado— included more participatory selection processes for mayoral candidates, greater leeway for local party branches in the design of municipal election platforms, and the creation of structures that could receive and channel the demands and needs articulated by mayors into appropriate political institutions at the national level. The party leadership also adopted restrictions on the length of time a person could stay in either public or party office. For party office, a two-term limit was established. For deputies in the legislature, the limit was two terms (with the possibility of three under special circumstances), and for mayors, three terms. Some of the changes won by the reformist mayors were reversed as soon as the reformist wing was defeated in the battle for national party leader in November 2004. It is too early to say whether the momentum from local politics that is described here will be sustained over the longer term, but it nevertheless serves as an excellent example of the dynamics created by multiple political arenas.


With respect to candidate selection for mayoral positions, initially the sense among the parties was that party labels mattered more than individual candidates in municipal elections. This changed rapidly, however, as both parties gained experience with municipal politics. Pressure to establish more competitive candidate selection procedures came directly from the experience of some party cadres in municipal government. As Ortiz, mayor of Santa Tecla, put it, “the parties are becoming aware that the best way to sell their programs and to improve their image is increasingly at the level of municipal government. . . . The municipal government is like the letter of introduction. . . . [T]he parties have started to realize that if they don’t choose a good candidate with a good image, success is not possible. . . . Increasingly people are equating the party with the candidate, the candidate with the party. And increasingly, the parties are being more careful about choosing their candidates.”39 Outside observers working on municipal government have also noticed that both parties changed their attitudes toward local government and came to recognize that they needed to choose candidates for municipal government more carefully. This was because many of the problems people faced in the wake of the war had to be dealt with at local level. Moreover, donors had chosen to focus resources there, generating increasing demands from citizens for responsive and capable government, and putting pressure on parties to select mayoral candidates with higher capacity. Real money was attached to these demands because of donor interest, and the parties began slowly to realize the importance of municipal governance. Consequently, education levels of mayors have, on average, increased markedly.40 A USAID-funded report in 1997 noted, for example, that educational levels of mayors had already risen from an average of third to eleventh grade.41 Another factor putting pressure on local-level government was the fact that, in many FMLN areas during the war, there was no functioning municipal government. NGOs and community groups organized to meet the communities’ needs—upon the return of municipal officials after the war, these groups were not willing to settle for unresponsive government officials.42 As a result, mayors with an eye toward re-election translated this pressure into demands for internal party change to allow more participatory selection of candidates and greater input into party policy for local officials. The result was internal party primaries for municipal candidate selection in 2000. However, by 2002 the leadership of the FMLN, in the hands of the orthodox wing, backpedaled and imposed limits on primaries by stipulating that the national party leadership could review the list of people planning to compete in party primaries for public office or internal party leadership

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positions. The leadership justified this move by saying that it needed to correct for “an excess of democratism” in the party. Not coincidentally, it also had the effect of safeguarding the place of the orthodox wing and “impeding members of the reform tendency, especially at the level of municipalities, from competing under the flag of FMLN and, once triumphant, declaring themselves in favor of another party.”43 Thus, the change in candidate selection procedures to restore greater central control was directly related to an intraparty struggle between the orthodox and reform wings. This did not settle the debate, however. On the contrary, the reform wing redoubled its efforts to gain control of the party leadership. The leaders of the reformist wing pressed their case by arguing that, while the party has paid much more attention to the legislative assembly (which, according to opinion polls, supports the orthodox wing over the reformist wing),44 municipal government is the place where the people have the most direct impact with government, where their most immediate needs are met. As Ortiz puts it, “having been mayor, and some of us have also been in parliament before coming to the municipal level, we realize that the real transformation happens at the level of the municipality, not at the macro level. And we don’t think that is sufficiently understood [by the party hierarchy]. So that is why we have pressed for the party to give more consideration to the municipal level in all its aspects. But as yet, the main party leaders haven’t gotten it.”45 In the view of Ortiz, generational change within the party had to come from below, from those who were demonstrating their ability by acting as mayors. “Every process has its stages and in this stage the presence of an important contingent of very youthful compañeros and compañeras will be seen assuming important positions and being integrated into processes that are key for directing the country. . . . The Front is a party with 60 percent young people and the process can’t be delayed. These people advance and take the initiative.”46 In response, Salvador Arias, deputy elected at the national level and member of the orthodox wing of FMLN, called the generational change proposal a “petit-bourgeois idea” that would not bring the desired results. Schafik Handal argued that internal elections were sufficient to bring “internal renovation” to the party, and cited a large number of new faces as evidence.47 However, longtime observers of the party complained of the lack of transparency and integrity in internal party elections. These statements were made in the run-up to party’s July 2003 internal primaries to choose its presidential candidate. Ortiz was pitted against Schafik Handal. During his primary campaign, Ortiz stressed that his experience as mayor in one of the country’s most important cities, as well as president of


the association of municipalities (COMURES), made him a stronger candidate who brought new ideas about how to develop the country. In preparation for the 2004 presidential elections, both the FMLN and ARENA experienced an unprecedented level of internal competition for the presidential slot. One newspaper columnist noted that “never before have there been such public displays of disunity, discussion and debate inside and outside the two major parties.”48 The Central American Monitor went on to note that “the biggest change is perhaps being felt in ARENA, where previously a candidate was announced only after secret negotiations at the very top of the party: there was never any open discussion about alternative names to that put forward by the governing council, COENA.”49 This time, five candidates came forward, some self-nominated, some backed by strong factions within the party. The FMLN experienced similar wrangling. Ortiz was narrowly defeated, but the struggle did not fail to affect Handal, who changed his campaign team and strategy with a view toward projecting a more moderate image. The party also adopted a more flexible approach to coalitions with other parties. Said Handal, “coalition is not ideology.”50 Indeed, defenders of the orthodox wing of the FMLN argue that the orthodox wing has reinvented itself in important ways in the twelve years since the signing of the peace accord. They point to strategic alliances the party made with the Convergencia Democratica (CD), the Partido Democrata Cristiano (PDC) among others for the 1997 municipal elections, to improve the party’s results over 1994. This flexibility, they argue, accounts for the much improved results in the legislative elections that year and the party’s victory in major cities like San Salvador and Santa Ana.51 Nevertheless, for many Handal “symbolizes a more traditional leadership, that of the old-style communists. There are many doubts about how he would handle the economy and the interconnectedness of the markets. Schafik is not Lula da Silva.”52 Handal was defeated by ARENA’s candidate, Tony Saca, in April 2004. Handal’s defeat was precisely the kind of external shock discussed in chapter 1 which, if internal conditions are ripe, can be expected to lead to significant party change. The FMLN’s strong showing in municipal and legislative elections in 2003 had created the expectation within the party that they could win in April 2004. Within the party, a coherent alternative to current national leadership already existed. Its differences with the incumbent leadership revolved precisely around the issue of how to improve party performance in national elections. When ARENA’s Saca defeated Handal, pressure from within the FMLN for party leadership change intensified.

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This point deserves emphasis. These elections generated two responses from the losing party. On the one hand, the reformist wing, which was not in the leadership of the party at this time, used the occasion to demand internal reform of the party. By contrast, the party leadership responded by calling on FMLN members of parliament to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the new government, echoing the habitual response of Afonso Dhlakama of Renamo in Mozambique. Concretely, Ortiz responded to the FMLN’s defeat in presidential elections by calling for the resignation of the party leadership. He then made a point of responding to President Saca’s call for cooperation between all major parties in coming up with the program for national government and met with legislators from other parties to discuss finances. The FMLN leadership, led by Handal, passed a resolution appealing to parliamentary deputies to boycott Saca’s inauguration. Meanwhile, Saca pointedly met in public with members of the FMLN’s reformist wing, which at the time was preparing to challenge Handal for leadership of the party later in the year. Soon thereafter, Handal decided to accept Saca’s invitation for the FMLN to participate in consultations on a number of policy issues.53 After that, Saca dealt exclusively with Handal in all contact with the FMLN. On July 25, 2004, the moderate wing of the FMLN, calling itself the Movement for Change in the FMLN, met in Nejapa, the home of then fourterm FMLN mayor Rene Canjura, and elected Oscar Ortiz as its candidate for general coordinator. Party-wide elections were scheduled for November 2004 to select the party’s national leader, or “general coordinator,” as well as coordinators for each of the country’s fourteen departments. Ortiz’s wing controlled eight of the fourteen departmental coordinator positions, all of whom sought re-election. Ortiz was defeated by the orthodox candidate for the party’s general coordinator, Medardo Gonzalez. The orthodox wing also consolidated its control over the party’s national council.54 Several months later, several hundred members and elected officials, including two mayors, three FMLN deputies, and a large number of local leaders, left the FMLN to form their own party, the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FDR). Following their departure, FMLN leaders took steps to reverse some of the internal party procedures the reformers had fought for, including secret, direct balloting for internal party elections.55 It is clear that, at both national and local levels, over the course of several electoral cycles, the divisions within the FMLN have been heightened and have become more salient to the party’s behavior toward political institutions. Elections have produced fierce internal competition within the FMLN and have led to changes in the internal balance of power and in internal rules and


procedures in such key areas as candidate selection procedures, though these changes have been subject to frequent revision. The leaders of two influential movements to challenge Handal for the leadership of the party built a basis of support from their mayoral positions in major cities. Mayors gained influence in the party due to their importance in gaining access to public office for the party, and by virtue of their experience and insights regarding how to improve the party’s electoral chances. However, the challenge posed by these officials was ultimately rebuffed by the incumbent party leadership, their reforms in party procedures reversed and their attempts to modify the party’s identity to attract a broader swath of voters at national level denied. Longtime observers of the FMLN assert that despite formalities, internal democracy is still sorely lacking on the most important decisions. “ . . . The truth is that the highest authorities of the FMLN have managed to have the last word when it comes to make the fundamental decisions.”56 By 2002–2003, mayors, legislators, and local party leaders had begun actively to distance themselves from the positions of the party’s orthodox leadership. In 2003, Facundo Guardado, at the time supporting a center-left group of small parties, said in an interview that “we are in communication with dozens of FMLN mayors, deputies, and leaders. Half of the FMLN is not campaigning [for Schafik’s presidential race in 2004] and Schafik knows that perfectly well.”57 Guardado went on to say, however, that “what they cannot see is that Schafik will tighten the screws before the elections are over. He will further consolidate control over the FMLN and all those who did not participate in the campaign will be out, starting right then, at that moment.”58 Echoing these sentiments, Zamora argued that, “what these years show is the difficulty or inability of the FMLN to positively assume its internal diversity and adequately manage its internal contradictions.” He argued that the FMLN has followed a “classic leftist pattern” of managing diversity by expelling its dissidents.59 As with Renamo and HDZ, those in the FMLN most interested in adapting to electoral politics in ways that could mark a significant departure from past party practice found it necessary to leave the party in the pursuit of their goals. Local Government and Party Engagement with the Political System We have seen that a number of the most important leaders of the moderate wing have come from municipal government and to a lesser extent from the legislature. If we look at how the FMLN has conducted its municipal governance where elected, we also see evidence of policy innovation and

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experimentation that goes beyond what the party seems able to muster for its national campaign platform. FMLN mayors have demonstrated flexibility and creativity in working at the municipal level. They have courted alliances with other parties, worked with donors and civil society organizations to broaden citizen participation in decision making. Municipal government has also led to the creation or revitalization of interest groups that cross party lines. Perhaps most interesting, mayors of FMLN and its principal rival, the ruling ARENA party, have come together several times under the banner of COMURES, the Corporation of Municipalities of the Republic of El Salvador, to pressure the legislature to reform the tax structure to give municipalities more autonomy and to pass other legislation of common interest to municipal government officials of both parties. COMURES is a longstanding institution that was essentially dead on its feet until the postwar period, when municipal governments saw in it a useful tool for making their needs heard in the national assembly and national government. In COMURES, municipal governors have banded together to press their interests. This has forced confrontations between local, elected officials and their party superiors. It has demonstrated to citizens that the two parties can and will work together to improve local governance, or at least to fight for the interests of local government. And it has forced both political parties and the legislature to develop structures that can more effectively take into consideration the demands coming from municipal levels. As the former mayor of Soyapango (FMLN) put it, the government “listens to COMURES, because their [ARENA] mayor is there also. And COMURES takes collegial decisions, because in COMURES there are mayors from all the parties and tendencies. Its rules require that mayors from all the political parties have representation in the council of directors. . . . [T]he system in COMURES is designed so that no party is left out. And so the international organizations and the government listen to it. But of course the results vary.”60 Indeed, COMURES over the last ten years has become a well-institutionalized organization with clearly spelled out rules about decision making and the allocation of power within the organization that are respected in practice as well as in theory. Notably, the executive board of COMURES is constituted on the basis of parties’ total vote share in municipal elections. This makes representation on the COMURES board more proportional to vote share than the municipal electoral system. Since municipal elections in El Salvador are winner-take-all, parties’ vote shares tend to be disproportionate to the number of councils they win. For example, in 1997, ARENA won 36.68 percent of the municipal vote nationwide, but gained control of 61.07


percent of municipalities based on this vote share. The FMLN won 32.62 percent of the municipal vote in those same elections, but won control of only 20.61 percent of the country’s municipalities.61 Following those municipal elections, the new COMURES board was formed on the basis of vote shares, resulting in a more proportional ten seats for ARENA and nine for the FMLN. Local governance has thus provided for closer cooperation between elected officials, opposition party local branches, and civil society organizations in the articulation of citizen interests. As the COMURES experience shows, it has also affected the articulation and aggregation of interests in national politics. Local government has served as a focal point around which Salvadoran and foreign NGOs and donors can pursue good governance agendas. Such organizations routinely point to, and aim to secure, “the growing importance of local and regional spaces as privileged sites of citizen participation, cooperation, and the construction of alliances with respect to local and regional development processes and the solution of the concrete problems that confront the population,” as one Salvadoran NGO put it.62 A measure of the success of COMURES in aggregating and articulating the interests of mayors is the fact that the Flores government actively sought to weaken COMURES in the fear that it would divide the ARENA base.63 More positive examples could also be cited. For example, COMURES has become accepted by government bodies—including executive commissions and the national legislature—as a legitimate, representative interlocutor on municipal issues. COMURES has taken clear advocacy positions and has influenced the passage of a number of important pieces of legislation on municipalities, including one that increased municipal autonomy and another that raised the percentage of national revenue allocated to municipal governance.64 Intervention by these interested actors had the effect of broadening the range of strategies municipal governments could use for good governance— they could interact with local civil society organizations and cooperate with mayors from other parties to lobby the national government on behalf of the interests of municipal government. They have also tested more participatory strategies and are conscious that voters want something different at local level than just ideology, in a way that their national level counterparts are not. One former FMLN mayor from an outlying municipality, for example, noted that FMLN mayors had adopted the practice of encouraging community groups and representatives to approach the central government directly with their demands. “Opposition administrations are little listened to. When they are listened to it is not so much because the administration of the municipality goes, but because the community representatives go along.”65

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Former FMLN NGOs have transformed into think tanks specifically oriented toward local government, and they are having an impact on they way parties, donors, and government thinks about local governance issues. Donors and the local governance think tanks together have developed direct and ongoing relationships with local government officials and other key actors in local governance. They have been able to influence this level of governance directly, without going through the national party structure or national political institutions. Mayors from all parties have been more than willing to work with donors and local governance NGOs because these groups offer resources, skills, and capacity building that can help them confront their day-to-day problems, make them more competitive in the next elections, and potentially raise their stature in the party. There have been concrete results for conflict management. Donors and local governance NGOs are particularly interested in promoting participatory local governance processes. One clear result has been the elaboration of a standardized and widely accepted methodology for drawing up a long-term investment plan for the municipality.66 There is also, of course, much that could be said about the FMLN’s engagement in the legislature. Though the focus of this chapter has been the role municipal politics has played in party development, we could also explore the behavior of the party’s legislative bench with respect to policy stances and cooperation with other parties. Broadly speaking, the same divisions between the reformists and orthodox wings are reproduced in the legislative bench. However, because of the involvement of the party’s top leadership (which has been predominantly orthodox) in the legislature (Handal was a deputy from 1999 onward), because of the public visibility of the legislature and above all because the legislature is where the two major parties are afforded their main opportunity to spar with one another, the legislature has been less fertile ground as a nursery for direct challenges to the party leadership. Conclusion In the FMLN, participation in repeated elections has produced an internal constituency for democracy. The hard core of this constituency has grown out of municipal politics. Mayors, interacting directly with citizens and responsible for their most basic and immediate needs—housing, physical security, basic public services—became forceful advocates for internal party changes intended to produce more electable mayoral candidates for the party. They sought greater citizen input into the selection of mayoral candidates. And they demanded the creation of channels for the forwarding of feedback


from the grassroots up to party policymaking organs, including the party’s legislative bench. Such reforms would, of course, benefit the mayors themselves, by allowing them more autonomy to respond to the demands of voters and therefore, theoretically, increasing their chances of reelection. They would also shift the balance of power within the organization toward the reformist mayors, by creating more direct channels for mayors to have input into party policy. An interesting question is whether these mayors were reformists first, or mayors first. In other words, did their experience as mayors lead them to espouse the more practical, election-oriented views of the reformist wing over those of the orthodox wing? Or did they seek out mayoral candidacies because they were already of a more pragmatic bent, or because they had ambitions to change the party? Initially, being a mayor brought neither a good salary nor much power. By 2004, mayoral positions in the mid-sized and larger cities were coveted positions held mostly by educated professionals. Either way, participating in municipal politics has given these officials a strong motivation and a certain capacity to push the FMLN toward greater investments in electoral politics. However, as we have seen, the end result of such pressure has tended to be not lasting reform of the party, but the expulsion of the dissidents. As with Renamo, HDZ and SDS, though a constituency was created for greater investment in electoralism in FMLN it did not succeed in prevailing over the party’s incumbent leadership. Instead, after each presidential election, a new party has been spun off. Like Renamo and to a certain extent HDZ, the FMLN has also benefited from the sense that many of its sympathizers had, that it was impossible to build an opposition in El Salvador without the FMLN. The most recent FMLN breakaway party, FDR, succeeded in winning only two legislative seats in the 2006 elections. It ran in coalition with CDU, which in the previous elections had won five seats running on its own.67 In El Salvador this outcome—the preservation of leadership that is less proactive in embracing electoralism—is perhaps less damaging to the chances for democratic development than in our other cases, since El Salvador already has a stronger cohort of “third parties” that have acted as kingmakers in the legislature, and since the leaders of these breakaway factions may be more equipped to create a viable party than their counterparts in Mozambique or western Herzegovina. For though the Salvadoran political scene is clearly dominated by the FMLN and ARENA, cleavage lines do not follow ethnic or other communal lines and may therefore be more fluid than in our other cases.

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In addition, the FMLN is a fairly well institutionalized party. It is clearly the most institutionalized of the parties we consider here. As such, its internal struggles are visible, which makes its leaders more accountable and more vulnerable to pressure from its base who are able to follow internal power struggles and make their own judgments about the relative value of the factional positions. While the attempts to democratize candidate selection procedures and to create more space for elected local officials in the party were ultimately defeated, they were not entirely without effect on the incumbent party leaders.


Conclusion

W

e noted in the introduction that much of the literature and practice concerning democratic state building was founded on the assumption that establishing formal democracy as the basis of the postwar political settlement would help to create moderate political actors committed to democratic politics. This assumption however conflates two separate issues. The first is that democracy will have a moderating effect on parties, leading them to eschew values thought by state builders to be in conflict with substantive democratic outcomes, such as ethnic nationalism or religious fundamentalism. The second is the creation of democratic political actors—actors committed to the use of democratic rules and procedures to achieve their goals. The former presumes that democracy will bring changes in party goals or identity; the latter does not. The gradual commitment by political actors to the use of democratic institutions to achieve their goals is what Rustow defined as elite habituation to the rules of the game. While shifts in party values or identity may accompany habituation to democratic politics, the two do not necessarily go together, as we discuss in more detail later. Changes in a party’s substantive goals and identity are neither necessary nor particularly likely. Parties commit to the use of democratic rules and procedures for instrumental reasons. Democratization is conceived of here as a procedural change, not, in the first instance, a substantive one. This book has been concerned with the circumstances under which opposition politicians, and specifically those who have moved from the battlefield to the political arena, make this commitment to democratic procedural rules. When armed opposition groups are given a stake in formally democratic politics, do they begin to behave like democrats? This book set out to explore these dynamics in the case of four armed opposition groups that made the transition to political parties in the early 1990s: Renamo in Mozambique, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) and the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) in Bosnia, and the Farabundo Martí


National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Each of these parties grew directly out of an armed opposition group that entered a formally democratic political arena as part of a peace settlement to end civil war in the country. They all experienced at least ten years of electoral politics over roughly the same time period—1992 through 2006. We began with two propositions. The first was that repeated participation in electoral politics would create within each of these parties a constituency that called for investments to improve the party’s ability to compete successfully with other parties. We argued that such a constituency would emerge as a function of participation in elections, regardless of the very considerable differences in party characteristics, institutional framework, and historical legacies across our cases. Successful participation in electoral competition has a tendency to diffuse power within participating parties, as participation in elections at various levels and participation in governance requires distinct sets of skills and resources to be available in relatively large numbers of people. Moreover, the experience of campaigning and governing or participating in the legislature tends to create diffuse power centers within the party. It also generates conflicting ideas about party identity, the party’s primary “market,” and tactics and strategy. Pressure for changes to the party’s internal organization, targeted voter base, party identity, and the like were expected to be stronger when parties faced stiffer interparty competition and a relatively high degree of rule stability. While these two factors are a function of institutional frameworks, they are compatible with a wide variety of electoral and constitutional systems. They do not provide us with a design prescription. We also argued that pressure would increase as parties were more successful in getting their candidates elected. Public officials, we reasoned, would develop an interest in retaining the benefits of office, and they might well diverge from their colleagues in the party’s central hierarchy with respect to how best to win elections or on whether to continue to participate in electoral politics at all. In short, participation in repeated elections over time was expected to generate internal party divisions and pressure for the redistribution of power. To the extent that leaders can resist such change, they will. But elections are important to party leaders, regardless of their commitment to democracy, and in spite of the inherent risks to their own positions at the head of their parties. The gravitational pull of elections for ruling and opposition parties of all stripes is rooted in the fact that, in post-conflict states, elections have been established as the essential mechanism for regime legitimation in the eyes of domestic constituencies as well as international donors. That this norm is also applied to other “transitional states” is reflected in the growing number of

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countries all along the spectrum of “qualified democracy” that have held multiple sets of consecutive general elections. Beyond pressures from conditionality-minded donors however, party leaders have strong practical incentives for participation in elections. First, participation may be a prerequisite to securing financial resources, either from international donors supporting the democratization process, or from the state. Parties may receive straightforward campaign financing from the state or from donors. In addition, donors fund myriad programs associated with elections, many of them targeted at political parties. In this context, mere participation in elections, regardless of performance, offers opposition parties the prospect of state or donor subsidies to finance their campaigns and train their cadres, as well as the visibility that comes with electoral campaigns. In the resource-starved environment in which many opposition parties operate, these are not negligible considerations. Success in elections is also the party’s route to accessing the state and its resources. This does not mean we assume that parties want access to the state solely to loot it. Still, gaining elected office may be essential to parties’ very survival. The resources gained through access to public office—signifying salaries for party leaders and activists, the potential to provide various sorts of in-kind patronage to supporters, or even state subsidies for parties represented in parliament—are of vital importance for the survival of these new parties. Finally, parties that do not at least participate in elections and demonstrate a significant following will not only lose out in terms of formal outcomes of electoral competition, they may also lack the leverage to press for concessions informally in the aftermath of elections. Participation as a credible force in electoral politics gives parties opportunities to press the winning party for side payments or other compensation in return for quiescence. It also allows them to push for reforms to improve their chances in future elections. Thus political parties have compelling reasons to organize and participate in elections, even if they do not expect to win. Our second proposition was that the ultimate effects of such pressure could not be explained without examining the nested game in which party leaders are situated. The outcomes depend on the answer to two questions. What do parties have to do to realize their primary goals? And what do party leaders have to do to retain their positions at the head of the party? While participation in elections over time might indeed create a constituency for reinforcing the party’s ability to compete with other parties, the implications of such advocacy for party development or for democracy are not preordained. Party leaders might react by ignoring, suppressing, or expelling advocates of change. The party’s successful candidates for public office might press party leaders to subvert democratic rules and processes so that they could


keep their positions, rather than pressing them to reinforce democratic politics. Moreover, pressures from other constituencies within the organization might be pushing in a contradictory direction. For example, former military commanders deemed unsuited to candidacy for public office might view further commitment to democratization as a threat to their own power within the organization. Findings In comparing the experiences of Renamo, HDZ, SDS, and the FMLN, we have found that, given a modicum of rule stability, participation in electoral politics over time does indeed tend to create a group of politicians who have developed a commitment to the democratic rules of the game and who advocate investments in competing more effectively in elections over time. This often includes a willingness to invest in improved governance under democratic rules. However, in three of the four parties examined here, (Renamo, HDZ, and the FMLN), even after twelve to fourteen years of electoral politics, this constituency for change did not manage to prevail over party leaders who were in place at the end of the war and the onset of democratic politics. Instead, those leaders succeeded in riding out internal challenges from those they had relied on to advance the party’s fortunes in interparty competition, in most cases without suffering significant lasting changes to the party’s organizational routines or its balance of power. The would-be reformers created new parties in the wake of failure to seize control of their own, but these have so far had little impact on the nature of politics in Mozambique, Bosnia, and El Salvador. In the fourth case, SDS, reformers succeeded in taking control of the party and shifting some wartime hardliners to the sidelines. However, in the 2006 elections this group lost control of the party in the wake of electoral loss to SNSD, a party which took up the nationalist rhetoric that the SDS had moderated under the leadership of the reformers. Thus in each case “democrats” were created, but they soon found themselves and their more proactive agenda for adapting to democratic rules and procedures thrust outside the realm of “viable” opposition monopolized by the former armed opposition group. Why was this so, and what are the implications for democratic state building? The rest of this chapter summarizes the book’s findings, focusing on the complexity of the electoral environment the parties faced and the ways in which these external challenges shaped and otherwise interacted with internal party dynamics. It offers explanations for the different degrees to which party leaders were able to absorb or rebuff internal and external challenges

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without losing dominance of the party and without relegating the party to political obscurity. First however a more generalized point bears emphasis. Collectively, the analysis of the four cases highlights the importance of the polarization of the political arena, and to a certain extent of the accompanying polarization of the socioeconomic space, around the two parties that battled each other during the war. In each of our cases, control of the political space and, in three of our cases to varying extents, control of socioeconomic opportunities was monopolized by the ruling party and the former armed opposition group it had confronted during the war. Armed opposition groups turned political parties tend to come into the political arena with an identifiable voter base, at least minimal levels of organizational coherence and a comparatively large human resource base to draw on (since they recruited personnel during the war). They often come into politics with some material assets as well. These parties are often identified by voters and external actors as essential (if sometimes distasteful) actors for the viability of democratic politics. Thus they occupy a certain amount of political space and resources that allow them to monopolize the domain of “viable” opposition. Challengers are hard pressed to carve out their own political niches under these conditions, and incumbent party leaders are harder to shake. Party leaders know their voting bases are secure as long as the other party continues to exist. Such polarization not only pulls in voters, but also draws financial resources that might otherwise be available to draw a critical mass of competent, ambitious leaders to various “third” parties. This situation is exacerbated by relatively weak private economic sectors in each of our cases. With the exception of El Salvador, in our cases many of the most promising avenues to the accumulation of wealth were controlled by the ruling party, the former armed opposition group, or both. We shall have more to say about this later in our discussion of structural constraints. This finding suggests that parties are vital to structuring competition and organizing political space, even where democracy is new and parties are weak or “feckless.” Political contenders do need backing from parties that control material resources and that are capable of convincing voters that they have a chance at winning office. Parties determine who gets what when and how. Voters and supporters prefer to invest their support in parties that they deem viable, in hopes of reaping rewards at some future point. New parties attempting to build themselves up from scratch will find it difficult to attract the voters and human resources they need to succeed in the shadow of the dominant parties. There are very strong incentives, in other words, for leaders of


established parties to resist demands that they make concessions to challengers, since the options for challengers if expelled are so unattractive. Environmental Complexity The experiences of the four post-insurgent parties examined in the book suggest that vigorous parties able to support democratic politics are most likely to be the product of competitive environments, in which parties’ strategic choices are kept within certain parameters by careful institutional design and by external actors with economic influence, political authority, or both. These factors can be captured by the notion of environmental complexity. The institutional framework can increase or decrease complexity, as it affects things like the competitiveness of the political arena, the barriers to new party formation, and so on. Institutions can affect complexity in two ways—through the specific content of rules, and through the degree of stability of those rules. As far as content, alternative vote systems, proportional representation, bans on particular kinds of parties or platforms, and the like provide positive and negative incentives that constrain party behavior. External actors have also played an important role in shaping the initial institutional framework and in supporting the consistent implementation of the rules of the political game, through such efforts as election monitoring and capacity building for legislators, local elected officials, members of the judiciary and civil society. In many cases international actors have been influential in shaping the rules of the game, thereby helping to determine which kinds of parties may have a competitive advantage, and they have certainly affected actors’ calculations regarding whether to continue playing the game. Because elections have been made the centerpiece of internationally led state-building efforts in post-conflict cases and an integral part of the good governance agenda that dominates post-conflict peace building and indeed the majority of Western aid to Africa, international actors have also played an important role in reducing the uncertainty of political actors regarding whether or not the new rules of the game are there to stay, and whether and how transgressions of those rules are likely to be punished. In Bosnia and Mozambique, donors and international actors overseeing the peace process played important roles in tipping the balance of internal power struggles within major political parties. In Bosnia, the Office of the High Representative, created by donors and other external actors involved in brokering and overseeing the peace, was formally empowered to remove elected public officials and to ban politicians from positions of authority within political parties. In Mozambique, the donors’ heavy financial and

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moral support for Renamo’s leader, Afonso Dhlakama, helped to immunize him against internal challengers. Electoral Competitiveness We have argued that the more complex a party’s electoral environment, the more likely is internal differentiation within the party leadership. Extant theory on party development suggests that the environment becomes more complex with an increasing number of parties; with candidate-based rather than party-list electoral systems; with parties that compete for the same voters; and with elections on multiple territorial levels. A more complex environment reduces predictability, making it more difficult for leaders to dictate successful strategies for advancing the interests of the party. It is also likely to shift the bases of organizational power (perhaps in unpredictable ways), because successful performance at municipal level requires greater autonomy for municipal candidates from the central hierarchy, or because the dominant coalition is no longer the group most able to garner voter support for the party. The electoral environments these parties faced presented a fairly robust range of complexity. Within this context, environmental complexity—competitive elections and elections in multiple arenas—had the expected effects on internal party dynamics. They created constituencies for greater efforts to win elections. In our cases, these included calls for more participatory candidate selection procedures, greater influence for elected officials over party decisions, and shifts in the parties’ electoral strategy or even party identity. In Renamo and HDZ, the emergence of such reform factions however tended to have little impact on the way these dominant opposition parties actually behaved. Leaders could afford to slough off challenges, and the parties challengers formed were unable to compete. In SDS and FMLN, challengers were able to have some impact on internal party governance. These differences arise in part as a result of varying degrees of electoral competitiveness in the parties’ environments. In the Bosnian Republika Srpska, SDS faced a more competitive environment than in the other three cases, and reformers succeeded in purging much of the old guard and bringing about reforms toward greater internal democracy. In El Salvador, the FMLN also faced a competitive environment in which it was able to win office at municipal levels and in the legislature. Its success in these arenas, and particularly at the municipal level, gave leverage to party officials whose perspectives and interests diverged from those of the party hierarchy. Because municipal elections were important to the FMLN leadership, reformers found some purchase with the leadership.


Where competitive pressures were absent or weak, constituencies for investing in electoral politics emerged and challenged incumbent party leaders, but were rebuffed. In most cases, these challengers left to form their own parties, but these were no match for either of the two former belligerent parties. In HDZ, these reformist elements did not gain the ascendancy, though they did maintain a certain degree of influence in the party. In Renamo’s case, they were purged and went on to form their own party. And in the FMLN, the growing strength of municipal government and the FMLN’s strong performance in municipal elections since 1997 helped feed a reformist movement that challenged the party’s incumbent leaders for control of the party, who also sought to change the way the party appeals to voters. One of the findings that cuts across the Mozambican, Bosnian, and Salvadoran cases is that the force of interparty competition is likely to be stronger on a party the more that party succeeds in getting its candidates elected. Individuals who are elected to public office have more opportunities to develop vested interests in the democratic institutions that have advanced their careers and the confidence, ambition, visibility, and constituencies that embolden them to challenge the party’s existing leadership. This tendency is quite clear in all four of the parties considered here, though it is highlighted particularly well in the case of the FMLN. In each of our cases, those most committed to competing in elections and to bringing about internal reforms in the allocation of authority within the party toward greater openness and participation were those who had been elected to public office. In the FMLN and HDZ, these were subnational officials— mayors in the former cases, mayors and cantonal officials in the latter. In Renamo and SDS, they were members of parliament. It is not true, however, that all or even most FMLN representatives elected to public office supported the reformist wing of the party. It is therefore not possible to draw a straight line connecting experience in public office to support for greater investment in democratic politics. As Christine Wade argues, the division of the FMLN into orthodox and reformist wings dates to the beginning of the party’s involvement in electoral politics in 1994.1 There is no doubt, however, that the source of the division was electoral politics, and it was repeated participation in electoral politics that led to multiple ruptures in the party leadership. While challenges to the incumbent leadership (many of them deputies in the legislature themselves) came from both legislators and municipal politicians, the most sustained and arguably the most serious challenge to party leaders was led by the party’s mayors. More direct attempts to force or entice leaders to change their parties in ways deemed conducive to successful democratization were far less effective than the pressures generated by electoral competition. This is so even in cases,

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as with the two Bosnian parties, where terrific direct pressure was exerted on party leaders by international authorities to reshape their party identity or to purge members of the leadership deemed unacceptable by the international authorities. In addition, institutional engineering was sometimes trumped by internal party politics in ways that could not be easily foreseen without a clear understanding of those internal dynamics. The contrasting fortunes of internal challengers to party leadership in HDZ and SDS from 2002–2006 highlight these points. Structural Constraints Structural factors tended to undercut or dilute the effects of both institutional design and the interventions of international donors. The conditions of ending the war and creating a postwar settlement created some structural rigidities that weakened any impact that electoral politics might have had on the political system as a whole. Political settlements tended to crystallize wartime polarization within the political system, as voters had to go to the polls at a time when party allegiance was still a better guarantee of political, economic and physical security than relying on weak or nonexistent state institutions. Political settlements were negotiated jointly by ruling parties and the armed opposition groups, and this frequently meant the incorporation of institutional mechanisms that protected their dominance or at least afforded them a competitive advantage. Importantly, in SDS, our single case in which reformers did gain control of the party apparatus for a significant period of time, polarization of the electoral arena did not apply because Serbs had RS largely to themselves. Thus the wartime cleavage was not politically salient for most of the postwar period. SDS made significant internal changes both to accommodate direct pressures from the international authorities, and to compete successfully in multiparty politics in what was essentially a monoethnic entity, where championing the interests of ethnic Serbs failed to set SDS apart from its competitors. SDS invested in the kinds of moderating reforms called for by the international community and sought to develop a party platform that was broader than Serb nationalism, though nationalism was still an important component. The degree to which dominant parties controlled opportunities for economic gain was another important structural factor shaping both the incidence of internal challenges to party leaders and the reaction of leaders to such challenges. One could argue, for example, that the reformist cohort in SDS was also better able to maintain power, even though it had the tough job of marginalizing party strongmen, because it was able to parcel out economic spoils to hardliners in exchange for control of the party. Political leadership of


the party was not the only prize—it had, under intense external pressure, been partially delinked from control of the party’s spoils. This argument highlights an important and underappreciated limit on democratic state building: the difficulty of redistributing political power within a political system on the basis of competitive elections, when economic and political resource distributions are highly skewed to begin with. Substantial shifts in the relative strength of the parties in these systems are unlikely to occur through electoralism alone. The final section of this chapter returns to this point in examining the implications for democratic state building. The enormous resources necessary to mount an effective challenge on these states, with their tremendous control of political and economic resources, gives incumbent leaders considerable protection against internal challenges. This point is not lost on the leaders of the former armed opposition groups. They realize that, however unhappy challengers may be on the inside of the party, they have no chance on the outside because neither potential political nor financial backers believe they can mount an effective opposition. Rule Stability This leads us to a related facet of environmental complexity, rule stability. Changes in rule stability might also change structural circumstances and open space for changes in both the intra- and interparty balance of power. For example, the leadership of SDS in 2006 suffered serious challenges to its authority when uncertainty increased over the constitutional parameters of the Bosnian state. This uncertainty was a result of two looming deadlines: one on the final status of Kosovo, and the other the potential elimination of the Office of the High Representative. Authorities in Belgrade had talked openly of the possibility of linking independence for Kosovo to a referendum in the Serb Republic on whether to secede from Bosnia and join Serbia. And talk of the departure of the last High Representative created the possibility that the constitutional arrangement enshrined in the Dayton Agreement and much contested by the various wartime nationalist parties might be reconfigured. As a result, the 2006 elections revolved around escalated nationalist rhetoric. SDS saw its habitual dominance eclipsed, if only temporarily, by other parties that were able to take advantage of this uncertainty. Politics in the Federation of BiH were less directly affected by these events. The status of the Federation, as a mixed ethnic entity, was not in doubt. The leadership’s intransigence and failure to fully embrace the political rules of the game had weakened its ability to operate in the country’s increasingly strong political institutions to greatest advantage. Hence a group of legislators,

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themselves feeling hamstrung by the party’s rejectionist tactics, sought to gain control of the party’s ruling apparatus. When that failed, they left the party and succeeded in splitting HDZ’s usual vote share in half in the next legislative elections. Party Characteristics The literature on party development leads us to expect that party characteristics, such as the degree of institutionalization or organizational complexity, might have an impact on the likelihood that internal challenges to the party leadership would emerge and on the chances that such challenges would succeed. One reasonable hypothesis is that institutionalized parties are likely to be better equipped to handle the internal conflicts and tensions that repeated participation in elections will generate. On the other hand, one might argue that institutionalized parties are less flexible, even rigid, and therefore find it more difficult to adapt to changes in their environments in a timely fashion. Our cases suggest that whether or not a party was institutionalized had little impact on the incidence of internal challenges to party leaders. SDS, HDZ, and FMLN were all fairly well institutionalized early on in the postwar period. Renamo was not. All experienced similar kinds of internal challenges as a result of participation in electoral politics over time. These challenges were more successful in SDS and FMLN. The FMLN is the most institutionalized party of the four, SDS slightly less so. But SDS was hardly less institutionalized than HDZ. Instead, the distinction that stands out is the fact that for SDS and FMLN, accommodating at least some of the demands of the internal constituencies for greater investment in electoral politics was vital for the party’s ability to thrive in the electoral arena, while for HDZ and Renamo this was not the case. If anything, our cases suggest that institutionalization may well be a function of environmental complexity, a finding that is also supported by the literature on party development. For instance, the particular set of challenges faced by Renamo after the end of the war in Mozambique produced a party that was perennially weak in organizational terms but that did relatively well in the electoral arena due to the polarized nature of Mozambique’s political environment. Renamo found that it could build a voter base in peacetime on the back of its wartime agenda, which minimized the need for organizational change within the party and, at least initially, reduced challenges to the party’s top leadership from within. The party’s leadership, which was highly centralized and personalized in the party’s president, Afonso Dhlakama, discovered that simply keeping the wartime political cleavage alive in the postwar era was


enough to win a substantial share of the vote (nearly half in the first two general elections). We also suggested at the outset that it might be important to consider the degree to which participation in electoral politics shifted power from one sub-group to another within the party. Did it create new factions that crosscut existing cleavage lines? Did it reinforce existing cleavages? And did this have any effect on the incidence or success of challenges from internal constituencies with a stake in electoral politics? Elections exacerbated pre-existing cleavages within both HDZ and SDS. In both cases, the pre-existing division was geographic in character. In HDZ, politicians from central Bosnia tended to be more interested in adapting to electoral politics because they were more keen to be part of the Bosnian state than their counterparts from western Herzegovina, many of whom supported secession and union with Croatia. In SDS, politicians from areas closer to Banja Luka were considered more cosmopolitan than their harder-line colleagues in Eastern Herzegovina, many of whom rejected the notion that RS should be part of Bosnia. In both cases, splits resulted along these cleavage lines that led to the creation of new parties (Zubak’s NHI and Prlic’s European party in the case of HDZ, and Plav˘sić’s SNS in the case of SDS). Later, the balance of power shifted around this cleavage, and both HDZ and SDS spawned breakaway parties that complained that the party’s leadership had been compromised by their cooperation with international authorities on implementing the Dayton Agreement. In the FMLN, the orthodox–reformist cleavage did tend to divide along the lines of its constituent parties initially, though over time the salience of affiliation with one of the Front’s constituent parties faded in this regard. In Renamo, divisions over approach to electoral politics clearly crossed preexisting cleavage lines. Preexisting cleavages had centered on whether one fought in the bush during the war, or whether one joined after the peace or served as an urban or external clandestine member. Where one stood on the party’s approach to elections depended to a considerable degree on where one sat— in parliament, or outside. Differences across our cases in how electoral politics split the parties seem to be of relatively little importance in understanding either the incidence or the success of demands for greater investment in electoral politics. Where participation in repeated elections reinforced pre-existing cleavages, the formation of breakaway parties may have been easier. We might expect that where a constituency for investing in democratic politics incorporated politicians from both sides of a preexisting internal fault line, its chances for success might be greater. The evidence from our cases is too limited to provide more than tentative support for this hypothesis.

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Implications Party adaptation to the democratic rules of the game is most likely where there is vigorous interparty competition, because competition creates internal pressure—pressure to rethink the party’s identity, to reconsider who should constitute the party’s core constituency, to consider which elements of the identity or program are essential to the party’s survival or success and which are negotiable. It creates pressure from those who have been elected or, perhaps even more, from those who want to be elected, but have been frustrated in that desire. Moreover, participation in electoral politics diffuses power within political parties, whether this is done consciously or not. The more competitive the race for legislative seats, or for control of municipal authority, the more aggressive will be the party’s candidates for those positions in asserting the need for autonomy to make choices that will get them elected and re-elected. A number of scholars have made similar points about interparty politics. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way argue for instance that “even if the cards are stacked in favor of autocratic incumbents, the persistence of meaningful democratic institutions creates arenas through which opposition forces may—and frequently do—pose significant challenges. As a result, even though democratic institutions may be badly flawed, both authoritarian incumbents and their opponents must take them seriously.”2 Schedler notes that “as soon as ruling parties convoke elections with at least some measure of genuine plurality and competition, they provoke a fundamental shift in power. Even if they continue to control the structural conditions of the game, they surrender control over its conditions of acceptability to opposition parties.”3 Similar points could also be made with respect to the dynamics of internal party politics engendered by electoralism. Once incumbent party leaders concede the need to compete effectively in elections, they surrender power to those in the organization who are best able to be elected and to guide the party to future electoral victories. One of the more troubling implications for post-conflict state building that emerges from this study is the finding that structural factors seem to mitigate other factors in determining whether or not constituencies for greater investment in democratic rules and procedures prevail in the dominant parties or succeed in forming viable challenger parties. The parallels between armed opposition group leaders who ride out challenges to their rule from within the party after the onset of democratization, and sitting autocrats who launched “managed” transitions to democracy after 1990 witpystems, much like competitive market systems, advantages continue to accrue disproportionately to those who started off with advantages.


Little may be required for parties to maintain electoral dominance. This has been true even in Bosnia, where external forces have engaged in unprecedented efforts to strengthen political alternatives to the former belligerents, with little success. However, it is important to note that despite differences in approaches toward elections and the degree of risk party leaders are willing to accept to improve the party’s competitiveness in multiparty elections across our cases, there is no serious opposition by any of the party leaders to maintaining electoral democracy. What we have seen in our cases is not an explicit rejection of democratic rules and procedures, but rather different degrees of investment in those rules, as well as differences in the relative value attributed to winning office versus achieving other goals (such as ideological purity, or policy goals such as preserving the results of ethnic cleansing). This suggests, on the one hand, that very little is necessary to maintain a formally democratic system. Most importantly, in the cases examined here, parties can continue to play democratic politics for more than a decade without fully accepting the democratic rules and procedures as definitive (Renamo), without committing to the substance of the peace settlement (HDZ and SDS), and without institutionalizing internal party democracy.4 Renamo represents the minimal case of leadership commitment to the democratic rules of the game. But even there, as environmental complexity has increased, as external challenges have been ratcheted up with the election of President Guebuza and changes to electoral rules, Renamo’s leadership has shown increased interest in investing in changes that it formerly would not consider, such as increasing the autonomy of the party’s parliamentary bench. What does it mean, then, to “make democrats” in settings such as these? It means creating the conditions that lead to the emergence of politicians committed to the use of democratic rules and procedures to achieve their goals. It does not mean their substantive goals will necessarily change. Nor does it mean that the politicians committed to the use of democratic rules and procedures— the “democrats” that have been created—will remain, or become, the dominant political actors. In HDZ and Renamo, constituencies for democracy emerged but failed to gain control of party leadership. They formed their own parties, which were unable to make any impact on interparty politics. In SDS, constituencies for democracy emerged and held the party’s leadership, due in part to international financial pressure and the threat of losing Republika Srpska by overplaying their hand with the international authorities. However, unlike HDZ, SDS was then eclipsed by another party, Dodik’s SNSD. Both parties were committed to using electoral politics to achieve their goals. Neither were integrationist moderates committed in full to the

Conclusion 155

principles hammered out at Dayton, as the international authorities had so fervently hoped to see. In the FMLN, both major factions, reformists and the orthodox wing, were committed to remaining in electoral politics. But one faction was more willing to allow electoral politics to dictate, to some extent, its substantive policy goals. The division within the FMLN approximates the divide in party types between policy/ideology-maximizing parties (orthodox wing) and office-maximizing parties (reformists). Reformists, who were most willing to commit their fate to democratic processes in both intra- and interparty politics, lost out in internal party politics to the orthodox wing who led the party. To incumbent party leaders, the challenge posed by reformists represented a threat both to their authority at the head of the party and to the party’s identity. A change in the latter would imply both the risk of damaging the party’s electoral performance, as well as risks to leaders’ dominance of the FMLN. The bottom line is that changing the incentive framework does not necessarily imply changes in actors’ substantive goals. At best, actors change the way in which they seek to realize their goals. This is not an inconsequential achievement. However, it is not the same as changing the nature of politics in a given polity. Electoral politics by itself will not eliminate political cleavage lines or conflicts between nationalists and integrationists; secularists and religious fundamentalists. At best, it will change the ways in which these conflicts are played out, though that in the long term could lead to more substantive change. If the definitive step toward democracy is the acceptance of elections by all actors as the authoritative mechanism for allocating political power, as Schedler and others have suggested, then our cases provide grounds for optimism. Participation in electoral politics over time did produce internal constituencies with vested interests in winning offices through elections, which in turn created pressures on party leaders to accept or repel this challenge. Structural political and economic factors, as well as less enduring factors, affected whether or not leaders were susceptible to their demands. What our cases do not support is the notion that democratization is a panacea capable of changing the substantive agenda of political conflict in post-conflict countries. Democratization can produce dynamics of its own that are self-reinforcing. But our cases suggest that commitment to democratic politics need not go hand in hand with commitment to the larger political settlement that democratic politics is expected to produce.


Notes Introduction 1. Dankwart Rustow, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (April 1970): 358. 2. For an elaboration on this, see Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Simon Chesterman, You the People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and Statebuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. Robert Grenier, “If You Love Lebanon, Set It Free,” New York Times, December 17, 2006. 4. For a discussion, see Carrie Manning, “Political Elites and Democratic State-building Efforts in Bosnia and Iraq,” Democratization 13, no. 5 (December 2006): 724–38. 5. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (2002): 8. 6. I define electoralism as a demonstrated commitment to holding regular, periodic elections. 7. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Prone to Violence: The Paradox of the Democratic Peace,” National Interest (Winter 2005/06): 39–45. For the full argument, see Mansfield and Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 8. Paris, At War’s End. 9. See, for example, Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” Foreign Affairs 76 (November–December 1997): 22–43; Andreas Schedler, “Elections Without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 36–50; Nicolas van de Walle, “Africa’s Range of Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 66–80; Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002), 51–65.

158 Notes

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

Larry Diamond, “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 21–35; Terry Lynn Karl, “The Hybrid Regimes of Central America,” Journal of Democracy 6 (July 1995): 72–86. Richard Joseph, “Africa: States in Crisis,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 3 (July 2003): 160. Staffan Lindberg, “The Democratic Qualities of Competitive Elections: Participation, Competition and Legitimacy in Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 42, no. 1 (March 2004): 61–105. Terrence Lyons, “The Role of Post-Settlement Elections,” in Ending Civil Wars, ed. Stephen John Stedman, Donald Rothchild, and Elizabeth M. Cousens (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), 215–35. George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Richard Rose and Thomas T. Mackie, “Do Parties Persist or Fail? The Big Trade-Off Facing Organizations,” in When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations, ed. Kay Lawson and Peter H. Merkl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 534. Andreas Schedler, “The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections,” International Political Science Review 23, no. 1 (2002): 103–22. A recent volume on electoral authoritarianism addresses the relationships between parties and repeated elections quite explicitly. See Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006). See especially pieces by Joy Langston, “Elite Ruptures: When do Ruling Parties Split?”; Nicolas van de Walle, “Tipping Games: When do Opposition Parties Coalesce?”; William Case, “Manipulative Skills: How do Rulers Control the Electoral Arena?”; Mark R. Thompson and Philipp Kuntz, “After Defeat: When do Rulers Steal Elections?”; and Staffan I. Lindberg, “Tragic Protest: Why do Opposition Parties Boycott Elections?” On Latin America, see, for example, Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). On Africa, see Matthijs Bogaards, “Electoral Choices for Divided Societies: Multi-Ethnic Parties and Constituency Polling in Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Studies 41, no. 3 (2004): 59–80; van de Walle, “Presidentialism and Clientelism in Africa’s Emerging Party Systems,” Journal of Modern African Studies 41, no. 2 (2003): 297–321; Lindberg, “Institutionalization of Party Systems? Stability and Fluidity

Notes 159

Among Legislative Parties in Africa’s Democracies,” paper presented at APSA annual meeting, November 17–20, 2005; Michelle Kuenzi and Gina Lambright, “Party Systems and Democratic Consolidation in Africa’s Electoral Regimes,” Party Politics 11, no. 4 (2005): 423–44; Shaheen Mozaffar and James R. Scarritt, “The Puzzle of African Party Systems,” Party Politics 11, no. 4 (2005): 399–421; Carrie Manning, “African Party Systems after the Third Wave,” Party Politics 11, no. 6 (2005): 707–27. On Eastern Europe, see, for example, Herbert Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections and Parties in New European Democracies (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003); and Geoffrey Pridham, Stabilising Fragile Democracies: Comparing New Party Systems in Southern and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1996). 17. Larry Diamond, “Introduction: In Search of Consolidation,” in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien eds., Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Regional Challenges (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xxiii. 18. On socioeconomic and demographic change, see R. J. Dalton and M. Kuechler, eds., Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); R. J. Dalton and M. P. Wattenberg, eds., Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); L. Karvonen and S. Kuhnle, eds., Party Systems and Voter Alignment Revisited (London: Routledge, 2001). On institutional frameworks and party change, see John M. Carey, “Institutional Design and Party Systems,” in Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien, eds., Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 67–92, and Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, eds., Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 19. On Eastern Europe see, for example, Herbert Kitschelt et al., Post-Communist Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Richard Rose and Neil Munro, Elections and Parties in New European Democracies (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003); Geoffrey Pridham, Stabilising Fragile Democracies: Comparing New Party Systems in Southern and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1996); Richard Hofferbert, Parties and Democracy: Party Structure and Party Performance in Old and New Democracies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Franz Oswald, The Party

160 Notes

That Came in out of the Cold War: The Party of Democratic Socialism in United Germany (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002); and Ingrid van Biezen and Peter Mair, “Political Parties,” in Paul M. Heywood, Erik Jones, Martin Rhodes, and Ulrich Sedelmaier, eds., Developments in European Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 97–116. On Latin America, see, for example, Scott Mainwaring and Timothy Scully, Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Mitchell A. Seligson and John A. Booth, Elections and Democracy in Central America, Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Todd Eisenstadt, Courting Democracy in Mexico: Party Strategies and Electoral Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). On Africa, see Matthijs Bogaards, “Electoral Choices for Divided Societies: MultiEthnic Parties and Constituency Polling in Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Studies 41, no. 3 (2004): 59–80; van de Walle, “Presidentialism and Clientelism in Africa’s Emerging Party Systems,” Journal of Modern African Studies 41, no. 2 (2003): 297–321; Lindberg, “Institutionalization of Party Systems? Stability and Fluidity Among Legislative Parties in Africa’s Democracies,” paper presented at APSA annual meeting, November 17–20, 2005; Michelle Kuenzi and Gina Lambright, “Party Systems and Democratic Consolidation in Africa’s Electoral Regimes,” Party Politics 11, no. 4 (2005): 423–44; Shaheen Mozaffar and James R. Scarritt, “The Puzzle of African Party Systems,” Party Politics 11, no. 4 (2005): 399–421; and Carrie Manning, “African Party Systems after the Third Wave,” Party Politics 11, no. 6 (2005): 707–27. 20. Serenella Sferza, “Party Organization and Party Performance: The Case of the French Socialist Party,” in Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montero, and Juan J. Linz, eds., Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 168. 21. Robert Harmel and Kenneth Janda, “An Integrated Theory of Party Goals and Party Change,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 6, no. 3 (1994): 259–87. 22. Kaare Strøm and Wolfgang C. Müller, “Political Parties and Hard Choices,” in Policy, Office, or Votes? How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions, ed. Müller and Strøm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–35; Richard Rose and Thomas T. Mackie, “Do Parties Persist or Fail? The Big Trade-Off Facing Organizations,” in When Parties Fail: Emerging Alternative Organizations, ed. Kay Lawson and Peter Merkl (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988).

Notes 161

23. See, for example, M. Laver and K. Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Peter Mair, “Party Organizations: From Civil Society to State,” in How Parties Organize: Change and Adaptation in Party Organizations in Western Democracies, ed. Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair (London: Sage, 1994), 1–22; Müller and Strøm, Policy, Office or Votes; Kay Lawson, ed., How Political Parties Work: Perspectives from Within (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994). 24. Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Katz and Mair, “Party Organizations”; Serenella Sferza, “Party Organization and Party Performance: The Case of the French Socialist Party,” in Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, ed. Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montero, and Juan J. Linz (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 166–90; Hans-Jurgen Puhle, “Still the Age of Catch-allism?” in Political Parties, 58–83; Rose and Mackie, “Do Parties Persist or Fail?”; Tsebelis, Nested Games; Todd Eisenstadt, Courting Democracy in Mexico: Party Strategies and Electoral Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 25. A notable exception is Cynthia McClintock, Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador’s FMLN and Peru’s Shining Path (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press, 1998). There are a handful of case studies, though no comparative studies, that explicitly address party transformation in post-conflict cases. Some are memoirs of wartime commanders or prominent politicians. Most of these, however, are not available in English. See for example Rubén Zamora, La Izquierda Partidaria Salvadoreña: Entre la Identidad y el Poder (San Salvador: FLACSO, 2003); Ondoga ori Amaza, Museveni’s Long March: From Guerrilla to Statesman (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 1998). Other single-country or comparative studies have sections that address party transformation. Comparative studies include Elisabeth Jean Wood, Forging Democracy From Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Michael W. Doyle, Ian Johnstone, and Robert C. Orr, Keeping the Peace: Multidimensional UN Operations in Cambodia and El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Terrence Lyons, Demilitarizing Politics: Elections on the Uncertain Road to Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006). Examples of case studies include David Chandler, Bosnia: Faking Democracy After Dayton (London: Pluto, 1999); Tommy Sue Montgomery, Revolution in El Salvador (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995); Carrie Manning, The Politics of Peace in Mozambique (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). There are

162 Notes

a number of post-conflict country case studies, mostly policy-oriented that provide comprehensive overviews of post-conflict challenges in selected countries, as well as volumes addressing the question of postconflict reconstruction more broadly and in comparative perspective. None of these works touches on party development in more than a perfunctory fashion. For examples of the former, see the World Bank’s Evaluation Country Case Study Series. 26. Charles King, “The Benefits of Ethnic War: Understanding Eurasia’s Unrecognized States,” World Politics 53 (July 2001): 524–52; David Keen, A Political Economy of Famine Relief in Southwestern Sudan, 1983–89 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press); Mats Berdal and David Malone, Greed or Grievance Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2000); William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998). 27. On two-level games, Robert Putnam’s classic formulation is useful here. Robert Putnam, “Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of TwoLevel Games,” International Organization 42, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 427–60. See also George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 28. Portions of the empirical chapters have appeared in slightly different form in the author’s previous publications, including “From Rebel Group to Political Party: The Case of Mozambique,” in From Soldiers to Politicians: Transforming Rebel Movements After Civil War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, forthcoming); “Party-Building on the Heels of Civil War: El Salvador, Bosnia, and Mozambique,” Democratization 13, no. 5 (2007) 253–72; “Armed Opposition Groups into Political Parties: Comparing Bosnia, Kosovo, and Mozambique,” Studies in Comparative International Development 39, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 54–77; “Elections and Political Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Democratization 11, no. 2 (April 2004): 60–87; “Elite Habituation to Democracy in Mozambique: The View from Parliament, 1994–2000,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 61–80. Chapter 1 1. Roland Paris, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 19. 2. See Paris, At War’s End for a discussion of these, as well as Chris Alden, Mozambique and the Construction of the New African State: From Negotiations to Nation Building (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

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3. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace, 1995, 2nd ed. (New York: United Nations, 1995), 62. 4. Cited in Paris, 6. 5. U.S. Committee for Security and Cooperation in Europe, “Elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sept. 12–13, 1998,” http://www.house.gov/csce/ bosniaelec.htm. 6. For a discussion, see Carrie Manning, “Political Elites and Democratic State-building Efforts in Bosnia and Iraq,” Democratization 13, no. 5 (December 2006): 724–38. 7. For an overview, see the introduction to that issue, Julia Buxton, “Securing Democracy in Complex Environments,” Democratization 13, no. 5 (December 2006) 709–23. 8. Karin von Hippel, Democracy by Force: U.S. Military Intervention in the Post-Cold War World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9. Elizabeth M. Cousens, “Introduction,” in Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies, ed. Elizabeth M. Cousens and Chetan Kumar (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 12. Hartzell and Walter discuss the importance of providing security (physical, economic, and political) for all participants to the peace process. See Caroline Hartzell, “Explaining the Stability of Negotiated Settlements to Intrastate Wars,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 43, no. 1 (February 1999): 3–22; and Barbara F. Walter, “The Critical Barrier to Civil War Settlement,” International Organization 51, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 335–64. 10. Michael Brown, “Introduction,” in The International Dimensions of Internal Conflict, ed. Michael Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1–32. 11. Buxton, 712. 12. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 1 (2002): 16. 13. Ibid., 16. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. See Samuel P. Huntington, “Will More Countries Become Democratic?” Political Science Quarterly 99, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 193–218. 16. See for example Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Richard Hofferbert, ed., Parties and Democracy (Oxford:Blackwell Publishers, 1998). 17. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

164 Notes

18. The literature on democratization and institutional design is very large. See for example Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Timothy Sisk and Andrew Reynolds, eds., Elections and Conflict Resolution in Africa (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 1998); Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives, and Outcomes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Timothy Sisk, Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Rein Taagepera and Matthew S. Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Benjamin Reilly, Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Philip G. Roeder and Donald Rothchild, eds., Sustainable Peace: Power and Democracy after Civil Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Kurt von Mettenheim, ed., Presidential Institutions and Democratic Institutions: Comparing Regional and National Contexts (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). 19. John M. Carey, “Institutional Design and Party Systems,” in Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies, ed. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 88. 20. Benjamin Reilly, “Political Engineering and Party Politics in ConflictProne Societies,” Democratization 13, no. 5 (December 2006): 812. 21. Ibid., 811. 22. Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 6. 23. Todd A. Eisenstadt, Courting Democracy in Mexico: Party Strategies and Electoral Institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12. 24. Ibid., 16. 25. Paris, 188. 26. Scott Mainwaring, “Party Systems in the Third Wave,” Journal of Democracy vol. 9, no. 3 (January 1999): 68. 27. Ibid. 28. North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance; Philip Selznick, Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation

Notes 165

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); Goran Hyden, “Governance and the Study of Politics,” Governance and Politics in Africa, ed. Goran Hyden and Michael Bratton (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1992), 1–26. For a formal treatment, see George Tsebelis, Nested Games. See also Robert Axelrod’s work on uncoordinated repetitive games. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). Dankwart Rustow introduced these points years ago in his seminal piece, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model,” Comparative Politics 2, no. 3 (1970): 337–63. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 72. See for example Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also the Hofferbert collection of essays on post-communist party politics. Richard Hofferbert, ed., Parties and Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998). Buxton, 719. For discussion of party assistance in democracy promotion efforts, see Krishna Kumar, “Reflections on International Political Party Assistance,” Democratization 12, no. 4 (2005), 505–27; Peter Burnell, Building Better Democracies. Why Political Parties Matter (London: Westminster Foundation for Democracy, 2004); Thomas Carothers, “Examining International Political Party Aid,” in Globalising Democratisation, ed. Peter Burnell (Routledge, 2006), 69–87; C. Gershman, “Democracy Promotion: The Relationship of Political Parties and Civil Society,” Democratization 11, no. 3 (2004): 27–35; Peter Burnell, ed., Globalising Democracy: Party Politics in Emerging Democracies (London: Routledge, 2006). Larry Diamond, “Introduction: In Search of Consolidation,” in Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Regional Challenges, ed. Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xxiii. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 408–10. Diamond, “Introduction,” xxiii. Mainwaring, “Party Systems in the Third Wave,” 67–81. Ingrid van Biezen and Peter Mair, “Political Parties,” in Developments in European Politics, ed. Paul M. Heywood, Erik Jones, Martin Rhodes, and Ulrich Sedelmeier (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 108. van Biezen and Mair, 108–9.

166 Notes

40. Ibid., 113. 41. Vicky Randall and Lars Svasand, “Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in Africa,” Democratization 9, no. 3 (Autumn 2002), 47. 42. Gábor Tóka, “Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in East Central Europe,” Studies in Public Policy, no. 270 (Glasgow: Centre for the Study of Public Policy, University of Strathclyde, 1997). 43. Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942), 269. 44. Ibid., 283. 45. Kaare Strøm and Wolfgang C. Müller, “Political Parties and Hard Choices,” in Policy, Office, or Votes? How Political Parties in Western Europe Make Hard Decisions, ed. Müller and Strøm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–35. 46. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems. For a classic example of an organizational approach to the study of political parties, see Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 47. Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, “The Ascendancy of the Party in Public Office: Party Organizational Change in Twentieth-century Democracies,” in Political Parties: Old Concepts and New Challenges, ed. Richard Gunther, Jose Ramon Montero, and Juan Linz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 48. David M. Olson, “Party Formation and Party System Consolidation in the New Democracies,” in Parties and Democracy, ed. Richard Hofferbert (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 11. 49. Andreas Schedler, “The Nested Game of Democratization by Elections,” Journal of the International Political Science Association 23, no. 1 (2002): 109. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 118. 52. Lucy Creevey, Paul Ngomo, and Richard Vengroff, “Party Politics and Different Paths to Democratic Transitions: A Comparison of Benin and Senegal,” Party Politics 11, no. 4 (2005): 472–73. 53. Creevey et al., 480. See also Shaheen Mozaffar and Richard Vengroff, “A ‘Whole Systems’ Approach to the Choice of Electoral Rules in Emerging Democracies: Senegal in Comparative Perspective,” Electoral Studies 21 (2002): 59–74. 54. Eisenstadt, 6. 55. Olson, 11. 56. Schumpeter, 283. 57. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, 82.

Notes 167

58. See Roberto Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: The Free Press, 1962). See also Gosta Esping-Andersen’s study of socialist parties in Western Europe: Gosta Esping-Andersen, Politics Against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). For a sampling of the voluminous literature on party system development, see Lewis, Party Development and Democratic Change in Post-Communist Europe; Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther, Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Scott Mainwaring, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Geoffrey Pridham, Stabilising Fragile Democracies: Comparing New Party Systems in Southern and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1996). 59. Sferza, 167. 60. Ibid., 168. 61. See Panebianco, Political Parties; Kay Lawson and Peter Merkl, When Parties Fail (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Gunther, Moreno, and Linz, Political Parties. 62. Panebianco, 210. 63. Ibid., 212. 64. Robert Harmel and Kenneth Janda, “An Integrated Theory of Party Goals and Party Change,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 6, no. 3 (1994): 265. 65. Ibid. 66. Frank Wilson, “The Sources of Party Change: The Social Democratic Parties of Britain, France, Germany, and Spain,” in How Political Parties Work: Perspectives from Within, ed. Kay Lawson (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 270. 67. Harmel and Janda, “An Integrated Theory of Party Goals and Party Change,” 267. 68. Ibid., 278. 69. Katz and Mair posit a gradual process of change in parties they studied from 1960 to 1990. Panebianco, by contrast, argued that one powerful shock could be enough to cause significant party change if the right conditions existed within a party. See Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, eds., Party Organizations: A Data Handbook on Party Organizations in Western Democracies, 1960-1990 (London: Sage, 1992) and Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 70. Robert Harmel and Kenneth Janda, Parties and Their Environments: Limits to Reform? (New York: Longman, 1982), 48.

168 Notes

71. Barbara Levitt and James March, “Organizational Learning,” in Organizational Learning, ed. Michael D. Cohen and Lee S. Sproul (London: Sage, 1996), 531. 72. Panebianco, 69. 73. Joy Langston, “Elite Ruptures: When do Ruling Parties Split?” in Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition, ed. Andreas Schedler (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2006), 61. 74. Ibid., 71. 75. Ibid. 76. Panebianco, 208. 77. Sferza, 171. 78. Herbert Simon, “Bounded Rationality and Organizational Learning,” in Organizational Learning, ed. Michael D. Cohen and Lee S. Sproul (London: Sage, 1996). 79. Panebianco, 210. 80. Ibid., 213. 81. Roberto Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (New York: Free Press, 1962). 82. Panebianco, 60. 83. Wilson, 275. 84. Tsebelis, 103. 85. Levitt and March, 517. 86. Reuven Y. Hazan and Gideon Rahat, “Candidate Selection: Methods and Consequences,” in Handbook of Party Politics, ed. Richard S. Katz and William Crotty (London: Sage, 2006), 110. 87. Ibid., 109. 88. Ibid., 116. 89. Wilson, 271. Chapter 2 1. See Giovanni M. Carbone, “Continuidade na Renovação? Ten Years of Multiparty Politics in Mozambique: Roots, Evolution and Stabilization of the Frelimo-Renamo Party System,” Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 3 (2005): 1–26; Carrie Manning, “Conflict Management and Elite Habituation to Post-War Democracy: The Case of Mozambique,” Comparative Politics 35, no. 1 (October 2002): 63–84. 2. Carrie Manning, “Elite Habituation to Democracy in Mozambique: The View from Parliament, 1994–2000,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 61–80.

Notes 169

3. Histories of this period can be found in Margaret Hall and Tom Young, Confronting Leviathan: Mozambique Since Independence (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997); Chan and Venâncio, War and Peace in Mozambique; José Luis Cabaço, “A Longa Estrada da Democracia Moçambicana” in Moçambique: Eleições, Democracia e Desenvolvimento, ed. Brazão Mazula (Maputo: Inter-áfrica Group, 1995): 79–114; Allen Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1983); Hans Abrahamsson and Anders Nilsson, Mozambique: The Troubled Transition, from Socialist Construction to Free Market Capitalism (London: Zed Books, 1995). 4. For a fuller discussion, see Carrie Manning, The Politics of Peace in Mozambique: Post-Conflict Democratization, 1992–2002 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002). 5. Hall and Young, 168–69. 6. For discussion of RENAMO tactics during the war, see William Finnegan, A Complicated War: The Harrowing of Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Robert Gersony, “Summary of Mozambican Refugee Accounts of Principally Conflict-Related Experience in Mozambique,” Report submitted to Ambassador Jonathan Moore, Director, Bureau for Refugee Programs, and Dr. Chester A. Crocker, Assistant Secretary of African Affairs (Washington, DC: April 1988); Alex Vines, RENAMO: Terrorism in Mozambique (London: James Currey, 1991); Hall and Young, Confronting Leviathan; William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (Johannesburg, South Africa: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994); and Mark F. Chingono, The State, Violence and Development: The Political Economy of War in Mozambique, 1975–1992 (London: Avebury, 1996). 7. One of these was Andre Thomashausen, a German citizen and law professor at UNISA (University of South Africa) in Pretoria. Personal communication to author from Thomashausen. 8. For example, Bruce Fein, an American, and Andre Thomashausen prepared a draft constitution, together with a seventy-two-page critique of the existing Mozambican constitution entitled, “The Dhlakama Papers.” A third document called for UN administration of government during a transitional period leading up to elections, similar to the UNTAC mission in Cambodia. 9. See Manning, Politics of Peace in Mozambique. 10. For a full discussion of this issue, see Manning, Politics of Peace in Mozambique. 11. Ibid.

170 Notes

12. Agencia de Informacoes de Mocambique (hereafter AIM), “Law on General Elections Procedures,” December 28, 2006. 13. Giovanni M. Carbone, “Continuidade na Renovação? Ten Years of Multiparty Politics in Mozambique: Roots, Evolution and Stabilization of the Frelimo-Renamo Party System,” Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 3 (2005): 1–26. 14. In late 2007, Renamo’s wartime information officer and prominent member of parliament defected to the Frelimo party, citing overwhelming financial problems as the reason. He had previously joined PDD. This was, to author’s knowledge, the first defection to Frelimo of a former national level official from Renamo. Personal communication with the author. 15. Tony Vaux, Amandio Mavela, João Pereira, Jennifer Suttle, Mozambique. Strategic Conflict Assessment DFID/UK (April 2006). Available at http:// www.dfid.gov.uk/pubs/files/strategic-conflict-assessment.pdf. 16. Afonso Dhlakama, letter to Ambassador of Spain in Mozambique, Maputo, July 11, 1995, mimeo. 17. AIM, “Renamo Will Not Boycott Elections,” March 1, 2007. 18. Andreas Schedler, “The Nested Game of Democracy by Elections,” International Political Science Review 23, no. 1 (2002): 103–22. 19. This apt phrase was coined by Michel Cahen, “Dhlakama é Maningue Nice: An Atypical Former Guerrilla in the Mozambican Presidential Race,” L’Afrique Politique (March 1995), Paris: CEAN/Karthala: 119–61. 20. Carrie Manning, “Armed Opposition Groups into Political Parties: Comparing Bosnia, Kosovo, and Mozambique,” Studies in Comparative International Development 39, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 54–77. 21. Joe Hanlon, Mozambique Political Process Bulletin, no. 31 (December 29, 2004). 22. Eric Morier-Genoud, “Shaping Democracy: Frelimo, Liberalism, and Politics in Contemporary Mozambique,” unpublished seminar paper (Oxford, UK, 2007). 23. The main players are the Electoral Observatory (a consortium of NGOs involved in election monitoring), the Catholic church, the Islamic Council, the Christian Council of Mozambique, the Human Rights League, and the Women’s Forum. These organizations contributed members to the civil-society jury for selecting CNE members. AIM, “Civil Society Creates Jury to Establish CNE,” March 15, 2007. 24. AIM, “Law on General Election Procedures,” December 26, 2007. 25. Carrie Manning, “Elite Habituation to Democracy in Mozambique: The View from Parliament, 1994–2000,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 61–80.

Notes 171

26. See Carrie Manning, “Conflict Management and Elite Habituation in Postwar Democracy: The Case of Mozambique,” Comparative Politics vol. 35, no. 1 (October 2002): 63–84. 27. For a full discussion of these elections, see Manning, The Politics of Peace in Mozambique. 28. Manning, “Conflict Management and Elite Habituation,” 75. 29. Ibid., 78–79. 30. Paul Fauvet, “Mozambique: In the Shadow of Carlos Cardoso,” Africa Contemporary Record, 2001-02 (Holmes and Meier, 2004), B784–806. 31. Adriano Nuvunga, Multiparty Democracy in Mozambique: Strengths, Weaknesses and Challenges, EISA Research Report no. 14 (Johannesburg, South Africa: Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, 2005), 13. 32. Joe Hanlon, Mozambique Political Process Bulletin, January 5, 2005. 33. Hanlon, Mozambique Political Process Bulletin, December 2004. 34. Ibid. 35. Inge Ruigrok, “Mozambique’s 2004 General Elections,” Situation Report, Institute for Security Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa, February 3, 2005 This is essentially a replay of the aftermath of the 1999 elections. See Manning, Politics of Peace in Mozambique. 36. George Tsebelis, Nested Games: Rational Choice in Comparative Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 19. 37. AIM, “‘End of Democracy’ Claims Dhlakama,” December 20, 2006. 38. For a full discussion, see Carrie Manning, “Elite Habituation to Democracy in Mozambique: The View from Parliament, 1994–2000,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 61–80. 39. Fauvet, B796. 40. AIM, “Assembly imposes Code of Conduct,” February 27, 2007. 41. AIM, “Deadlock over Electoral Legislation,” April 27, 2006. 42. Hanlon, Mozambique Peace Process Bulletin, December 2004. 43. Ibid. 44. Edwin Hounnou, “Renamo Precisa Andar Mais Depressa,” Zambeze, May 17, 2007. 45. For a more detailed discussion, see Carrie Manning, “Constructing Opposition in Mozambique: Renamo as Political Party,” Journal of Southern African Studies 24, no. 1 (March 1998): 161–89. 46. Ibid., 187. 47. For a fuller discussion of Renamo’s party development in these respects, see Carrie Manning, “Elite Habituation to Democracy in Mozambique: The View from Parliament, 1994–2000,” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 40, no. 1 (March 2002): 61–80, and Giovanni M.

172 Notes

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

Carbone, “Continuidade na Renovação? Ten Years of Multiparty Politics in Mozambique: Roots, Evolution and Stabilization of the Frelimo-Renamo Party System,” Journal of Modern African Studies 43, no. 3 (2005): 1–26. Carlos Cardoso, a prominent Mozambican journalist, was investigating a corruption scandal at a recently privatized bank when he was assassinated. His trial implicated businessmen close to the Frelimo party, as well as the son of President Chissano, in the assassination plot. Carbone, 434–35. See Manning, Politics of Peace in Mozambique, 201–3. Joao Cravinho, “Mozambique: Recent History,” Africa South of the Sahara (Europa, 2004), 741–45. Ibid. Author interview, Maputo, May 20, 2007. Hounnou. Author interview, Maputo, May 21, 2007. Lusa press agency, September 20, 2006. Author interview, Maputo, May 21, 2007. Author’s personal observation of the conference, Quelimane, November 2004. Jeremias Langa, “Decisao Tomada, Decisao Inconstitucional,” O Pais, May 18, 2007. The ANFP itself subsequently became the subject of controversy, with many legal scholars calling it unconstitutional. ANFP extracted the function of regulating the civil service from an existing government ministry and created an entity that was neither fish nor fowl—falling outside of the rules governing state administration. The entity was placed under the control of the prime minister’s sister, Vitoria Diogo. João Cravinho, “Mozambique: Recent History,” Africa South of the Sahara (Europa, 2006), 808. Lusa press agency, September 20, 2006. AIM, “More Defections from Renamo,” September 12, 2006. Carbone, 432. Carbone, 1–26.

Notes 173

Chapter 3 1. This group, known as the Peace Implementation Council, consists of fifty-five countries, international organizations, and agencies that contribute financial assistance, troops, humanitarian aid, or other support for the peace process. 2. SFOR was preceded by IFOR, or Implementation Force, which had a maximum deployment of around 60,000 troops and lasted from Dec. 1995–Dec. 1996. In 2002, SFOR was streamlined and current troop strength is around 12,000 troops. 3. Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia (London: George Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1999), 254. 4. Ibid. 5. International Crisis Group, Elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, ICG Report no. 16, 22 September 1996, 13. 6. Thirty-first Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Wednesday, May 16, 2007, http://www .ohr.int/other-doc/hr-reports/default.asp?content_id=39813. 7. Changes in electoral regulations for the 2000 elections sought to change this. 8. From EASC reports for each election, http://www.oscebih.org. 9. International Crisis Group, Doing Democracy a Disservice: 1998 Elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, September 9, 1998, 12. 10. On the importance of studying not only what are the most desirable institutions in a given context but what are the most likely institutions to be chosen by political actors, see Timothy Sisk’s discussion of the South African transition. Sisk, Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). 11. International Crisis Group report, “Bosnia’s November Elections: Dayton Stumbles,” December 8, 2000, 1. 12. OSCE, “Elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina, September 12–13, 1998,” 1. 13. In its 1997 Bonn meeting, the Peace Implementation Council gave the High Representative the authority to punish parties and individual party members for non-compliance with aspects of the Dayton peace process. See “Bonn Peace Implementation Conference 1997: Bosnia and Herzegovina 1998: Self Sustaining Structures,” December 10, 1997 in OHR, Bosnia and Herzegovina Essential Texts (3rd Revised and Updated Edition), October 2000. 14. Details available at the OHR website, http://www.ohr.int/.

174 Notes

15. The use of such sanctions by OSCE over the years is well documented. See OSCE, Electoral Administration Supervisory Commission Decisions, available for each year from 1996–2001 at the OSCE archive, Sarajevo. 16. Author interviews, U.S. embassy personnel, Sarajevo, May 2001; See also Carrie Manning, “Elections and Political Change in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Democratization 11, no. 2 (April 2004): 60–86. 17. This by no means meant that all “problem” personnel were put out. Change in this respect was slow and halting. See for example International Crisis Group, War Criminals in Bosnia-Herzegovina’s Republika Srpska: Who are the People in Your Neighborhood? Europe Report No. 103, November 2, 2000. 18. These included two separate polls for the collective BiH presidency, the BiH House of Representatives, president/vice-president of the Republika Srpska, the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska, the House of Representatives of the Federation of BiH, and ten cantonal races within the Federation. 19. For the 2004 elections, mayors were directly elected for the first time. 20. Dragan Stanimirovic, “Nationalist Parties Confirm their Dominance in Bosnia’s Local Elections, but a Moderate Party in RS Makes Significant Gains,” Transitions Online, October 4, 2004. Available at http://www.tol.cz/. 21. Interview with Nerzuk Curak, BiH Dani, October 5, 2006. Monitored by Financial Times Info, “Political Analyst Says Outcome of General Election ‘Disastrous’ for Bosnia,” October 10, 2006. 22. For details, see Slobodna Bosna, June 6, 1998, and Oslobodjenje, June 13, 1998. 23. Author interview, Zagreb, June 18, 2001. 24. Author interview with Stjepan Kluic, second president of HDZ-BiH, Sarajevo, June 2, 2001. 25. One good review of HDZ’s early history is available in “Two Eyes in One Head: History of HDZ,” Slobodna Bosna, June 6, 1998. See also “Tudjman’s New Remote Control: Final Split in HDZ-BiH,” Oslobodjenje, June 13, 1998, and International Crisis Group, Changing Course: Implications of the Divide in Bosnian Croat Politics, Europe Report No. 39, August 13, 1998. 26. See International Crisis Group, Changing Course: Implications of the Divide in Bosnian Croat Politics, Europe Report No. 39, August 13, 1998. 27. Author interviews, Sarajevo, June 2001. 28. Author interview, Sarajevo, May 30, 2001. 29. International Crisis Group, Bosnia’s November Elections: Dayton Stumbles, Report No. 104, December 18, 2000, 4.

Notes 175

30. For accounts of this episode, see for example Roy Gutman, “Bank Job in a Battle Zone,” Newsweek, April 30, 2001; London Times “NATO Soldiers Back Bosnian Bank Seizure,” April 7, 2001. 31. OHR, Decision of the High Representative, March 7, 2001. Decisions of the OHR are available online at http://www.ohr.int/decisions/archive.asp. 32. Author interview, Mostar, May 22, 2001. 33. Author interview, August 2002. 34. Author interview, Mostar, August 2002. 35. Dragan Stanimirovic, “Nationalist Parties Confirm their Dominance in Bosnia’s Local Elections, but a Moderate Party in RS Makes Significant Gains,” Transitions Online, October 4, 2004. Available at http://www .tol.cz/. 36. “Main Bosnian Croat Party to Take Disciplinary Action Against Three Members,” BBC Worldwide Monitoring, October 27, 2005. 37. Financial Times Information, December 22, 2005. 38. HINA News Agency, November 11, 2005; “Bosnian Croat HDZ Rift Deepens as Incidents Mar Party Session,” BH Radio 1, supplied by BBC Monitoring Europe, January 5, 2006; “European Group to Keep Ban on Bosnian Croat Party Until Leader Resigns,” HINA News Agency, Zagreb, January 16, 2006, supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, January 16, 2006. 39. “Paddy Ashdown: Bosnia’s Future is in EU,” Vecernji List, January 30, 2006. 40. HRT1 TV Zabreb, supplied by BBC Monitoring Europe, April 7, 2006. 41. HRT1, TV Zagreb, supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, April 7, 2006. 42. 31st Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement for Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Secretary General of the United Nations, May 16, 2007. 43. See Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale Nota Bene, 2000). 44. RS total budget that year was $250 million. ICG, “Republika Srpska— Poplasen, Brcko and Kosovo: Three Crises and Out?” April 6, 1999. 45. Author interview, Banja Luka, August 2002. 46. Author interview, Banja Luka, August 2002. 47. This section is drawn from Carrie Manning, “Elections and Political Change in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Democratization 11, no. 2 (April 2004): 60–86. ˘ c, Banja Luka, June 2001 and August 48. Author interviews, Kalinić and Cavi´ 2002.

176 Notes

49. Confidential author interviews with SDS party officials, Banja Luka, August 2002. 50. For details, see International Crisis Group, Implementing Equality: The ‘Constituent Peoples’ Decision in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Balkans Report no. 128, (16 April 2002). ˘ c, Banja Luka, August 2002. 51. Author interviews with Kalinić and Cavi´ 52. Office of the High Representative, “Decision Removing Dr. Dragan Kalinić from his Positions as Chairman of the RSNA and as President of the SDS,” June 29, 2004. 53. For details, see the text of OHR’s June 30, 2004, decisions, http:// www.ohr.int/decisions/archive.asp?m=&yr=2004. 54. Bosnian Serb news agency SRNA, supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring, September 29, 2005. 55. Ibid. 56. Agence France Presse, “International Envoy Lifts Freeze on Funding for Serb Nationalist Party,” October 28, 2005. 57. “SDS Violates HR’s Decision: OHR,” ONASA News Agency, supplied by Financial Times Information, September 15, 2005. 58. “Bosnian Serb President Under Attack from His Own Party,” Nezavisne Novine November 5, 2005, supplied by Financial Times Information, November 9, 2005. 59. Financial Times Information, April 18, 2006. 60. Thirty-first Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement on Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Wednesday, May 16, 2007. Available at http://www.ohr.int/other-doc/hr-reports/default.asp?content_id =39813. ˘ c, BiH Dani, October 27, 2006. 61. Interview with Dragan Cavi´ 62. Thirty-first Report of the High Representative for Implementation of the Peace Agreement for Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Secretary General of the United Nations, May 16, 2007. 63. Author interview, Prime Minister of Canton 8, May 28, 2001. 64. These regulations are the result of a case brought before the constitutional court regarding the constitutional status of Bosnia’s three ethnonational groups. See “Constituent People’s Decision of the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” in Official Gazette of BiH, no. 23/00, September 14, 2000. 65. Author interviews with party leaders and elected HDZ cantonal and municipal officials in Western Herzegovina and Central Bosnia, June 2001. According to HDZ regional party board leaders, this practice of

Notes 177

66. 67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

separate administration was abandoned by 2002, but its spirit lives on particularly in Mostar. Author interviews with Croat government officials in Canton 7, 8, and 10, May 2001. In 1996, HDZ had an absolute majority of votes in four cantons. In three of those four, its share was above 80 percent. In 1998, it again dominated the vote in four cantons, though with slightly lower majorities. In both 2000 and 2002, HDZ won majority vote shares in only two cantons, with vote shares in both falling slightly from 2000 to 2002. Author interview, Banja Luka, June 15, 2001. Nina Casperson, “Contingent Nationalist Dominance: Intra-Serb Challenges to the Serb Democratic Party,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 1 (2006): 64. Detailed accounts of politics in the Republika Srpska can be found in several reports by the International Crisis Group. See ICG, Bosnia’s November Elections: Dayton Stumbles, Report No. 104, December 18, 2000; ICG, Bosnia’s Municipal Elections 2000: Winners and Losers, Report No. 91, April 27, 2000; ICG, Republika Srpska—Poplasen, Brcko, and Kosovo: Three Crises and Out? Report No. 62, April 6, 1999; ICG, The Wages of Sin: Confronting Bosnia’s Republika Srpska, Report No. 118, October 8, 2001. Other accounts of Serb politics in Bosnia are in Robert Thomas, Serbia under Milosevic: Politics in the 1990s (London: Hurst and Company, 1999), and Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth, and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven, CT: Yale/Nota Bene, 2000). OSCE RC Sarajevo field report, August 22, 2003. Refers to Cantons 6 and 7. OSCE field reports are available at OSCE archives, Sarajevo, Bosnia. OSCE RC Mostar field reports, October 3, 2003, and September 26, 2003. OSCE RC Mostar field report, September 12, 2003. OSCE RC Sarajevo field report, January 3, 2003. Field report, Regional Coordinator, Banja Luka, January 3, 2003. OSCE RC Mostar field report, November 21, 2003. OSCE RC Mostar field report, November 14, 2003. OSCE RC Mostar field report, November 7, 2003. OSCE, Special Audit Review, 2004, 1. OSCE SDS audit 2004, 3. OSCE RC Mostar field report, March 7, 2003. OSCE RC Mostar, September 5, 2003. OSCE RC Sarajevo field report, July 27, 2001. Personal observation.

178 Notes

Chapter 4 1. “El Salvador: FMLN Vows to Reverse Neo-liberal Measures if Wins Elections,” Panama City ACAN-EFE, September 1, 2003. 2. Terry Lynn Karl, “El Salvador’s Negotiated Revolution,” Foreign Affairs 71, no. 2 (1992): 147–64. 3. Gerardo L. Munck, “Beyond Electoralism in El Salvador: Conflict Resolution through Negotiated Compromise,” Third World Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1993): 76. 4. Cynthia McClintock, Revolutionary Movements in Latin America: El Salvador’s FMLN and Peru’s Shining Path (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 1998); Elisabeth J. Wood, “Civil War and the Transformation of Elite Representation in El Salvador,” in Kevin J. Middlebrook, ed., Conservative Parties, the Right, and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore:, MD Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Elisabeth J. Wood, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 5. McClintock, 90–91. 6. Ibid., 83. 7. CD was a coalition of MPSC (Popular Social Christian Movement), PSD (Social Democratic Party), and UDN. 8. McClintock, 83–85. 9. Karl, 152. 10. Ibid. 11. Gerardo L. Munck, “Beyond Electoralism in El Salvador: Conflict Resolution through Negotiated Compromise,” Third World Quarterly 14, no. 1 (1993): 75–93. 12. See Munck (1993), McClintock (1998), and Karl (1992). 13. Interpress Service News Agency, “El Salvador: Former Rebel FMLN Has Real Chance of Winning,” June 19, 2003. 14. Niko Schvarz, “La Perspectiva Electoral del FMLN Salvadoreno,” La Republica em la RED, August 13, 2003. 15. “Nueve Partidos en Contienda,” La Prensa Grafica, March 12, 2000. 16. Author interview, UNDP representative for local governance issues, San Salvador, September 22, 2004. 17. Wood, “Civil War and the Transformation of Elite Representation.” 18. For the 2006 legislative elections, FDR allied with another leftist party (UDC) to create Democratic Change, which is also known as CD. 19. “Flores Concerned FMLN Could Hinder US–Salvadoran Relations,” El Diario de Hoy, June 5, 2003.

Notes 179

20. Jack Spence, “Post War Transitions: Elections and Political Parties in El Salvador and Nicaragua,” prepared for presentation at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, Guadalajara, Mexico, April 17–19, 1997. 21. Spence, 18. 22. Wade, “From Rebel Movement to Political Party in El Salvador: the FMLN.” 23. Ibid., 12. 24. Spence, 23. 25. Rubén Zamora, La Izquierda Partidaria Salvadoreña: Entre la Identidade y el Poder (San Salvador: FLACSO, 2003), 128–131. 26. Wade, 10–12. 27. “Cisma en el FMLN: Facundo deja coordinacion,” La Prensa Grafica, March 16, 1999. 28. Author interview, Santa Tecla, September 20, 2004. 29. Zamora, 126. 30. Ibid., 81. 31. Ibid., 128. 32. Ibid. 33. Tim Campbell, The Quiet Revolution: Decentralization and the Rise of Political Participation in Latin American Cities (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 149. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. H. Baldersheim et al., eds., Local Democracy and the Process of Transformation in East-Central Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996). 37. Christopher Sabatini, “Decentralization and Political Parties,” Journal of Democracy 14, no. 2 (April 2003): 140–41. 38. Interview in La Prensa Grafica, March 21, 2003. 39. Author interview, Santa Tecla, September 20, 2004. 40. Author interviews with local government program officer, USAID, San Salvador, Sept. and with local government program director, RTI, San Salvador, September 2004. 41. Ben Crosby et al., “Democracy Sector Assessment: El Salvador,” San Salvador: Management Systems International, May 1997, p. 12. 42. Author interview, Research Triangle International representative, San Salvador, September 2004; author interview, USAID official responsible for local government programs, San Salvador, September 2004; author interview, UNDP official for decentralization programs. 43. Zamora, 83. 44. “El Terreno en Pugna del FMLN,” El Mundo, July 24, 2004.

180 Notes

45. Author interview, Santa Tecla, September 20, 2004. 46. “Ortiz: La Dirigencia del FMLN Deberá Ir Cambiando,” La Prensa Grafica, March 21, 2003. 47. “Handal: Voy a Estar en el Partido Hasta que Muera,” La Prensa Grafica, March 21, 2003. 48. “El Salvador: Race Wide Open,” Latin America Monitor: Central America Monitor 20, no. 7 (July 2003): 1–2. 49. Ibid. 50. El Diario de Hoy, Especiale Elecciones 2004, http://www.elsalvador .com/especiales/2003/elecciones2004/fmln/nota1.html. 51. “Resultados Electorales y Lucha Interna en el FMLN,” Realidad Latinoamericana y Caribena, http://www.caritaspanama.org/incidencia/realidad _lc/resultados_electorales_fmln.html. 52. Alberto Arene, Salvadoran political analyst interviewed by Interpress, June 19, 2003. “El Salvador: Former Rebel FMLN has Real Chance of Winning.” 53. “Ortiz Apuesta a Desplazar de la Escena a Handal,” El Diario de Hoy, June 18, 2004. 54. Christine Wade, “From Rebel Movement to Political Party in El Salvador: the FMLN,” in From Soldiers to Politicians: Transforming Rebel Movements After Civil War, ed. Jeroen de Zeeuw (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008). 55. Ibid. 56. Processo, weekly news bulletin of the Center for Information, Documentation, and Research Support of the Central American University, May 28, 2003, no. 1050.p 57. “El Salvador: Facundo Guardado Says Half the FMLN Does Not Want Handal to Win,” El Diario de Hoy, November 27, 2003. 58. Ibid. 59. Zamora, 132–33. 60. Author interview, San Salvador, September 15, 2004. 61. Ricardo Córdova Macías and Leslie Quiñonez Basagoitia, “La Situación Actual del Asociacionismo Local: El Caso de COMURES,” Documento de Trabajo, Serie Descentralización y Gobierno Municipal 98-1 (San Salvador: Fundacion Dr. Guillermo Manuel Ungo FundaUngo, 1998), 6–7. 62. Alberto Enriquez and Marcos Rodriguez, “Participacion Ciudadana y Construccion de Alianzas para el Desarrollo Local,” Desarrollo Local y Descentralizacion en Centroamerica: Primera Conferencia Centroamericana, ed. Funder-Fundaungo (San Salvador: Funder-Fundaungo, 2001). 63. Author interview, Morales UNDP, September 2004.

Notes 181

64. Córdova Macías and Quiñonez Basagoitia, “La Situación Actual.” 65. Author interview, San Salvador, September 15, 2004. 66. Author interviews with USAID, Research Triangle, and UNDP officials responsible for local government development. San Salvador, September 15–18, 2004. 67. “El Salvador,” in Political Handbook of the World 2007, ed. Arthur S. Banks, Thomas C. Muller, and William R. Overstreet (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), 368–73. Conclusion 1. Christine Wade, “From Rebel Movement to Political Party in El Salvador: The Case of the FMLN,” in From Soldiers to Politicians: Transforming Rebel Movements after Civil War, ed. Jeroen de Zeeuw (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2008). 2. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 53–54. 3. Andreas Schedler, “Democratization by Elections: The Menu of Manipulation,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 113. 4. For that matter, our investigation raises questions about the implications of internal party democracy for party adaptation to democratic rules, or indeed for party adaptation to environmental challenges more generally. Internal democracy appears to have little connection to whether or not a party commits to democratic rules and procedures governing inter-party competition.


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Index Adaptation, by parties: 8, 9, 10, 23, 29, 34, 38, 53, 153 Africa: 3, 6, 17, 21–22, 24, 45–46, 48–49, 51–52, 81, 146 ARENA: 119–123, 126, 132–133, 135–136, 139 Assembly: of Republic in Mozambique (AR), 50, 55–56, 60–61, 64, 67, 70; RS National Assembly in Bosnia, 81, 83, 89, 95–97, 104, 107; Legislative Assembly in El Salvador, 118, 120 Autonomy: of party leaders, 35–36; of Renamo parliamentary delegation, 44, 61, 65, 154; of ethnonational groups in Bosnia, 87, 103; of local government in Bosnia, 103, 122; of local government in El Salvador, 122, 135, 136, 138; of constituent organizations of FMLN, 127; of municipal candidates in general, 147, 153 Belgrade: 74, 150 Belligerents: 7, 43, 76, 154; see also Rebels and Guerrillas Bosnia: 2, 7, 10, 15, 39, 72–73; History of conflict in, 74–75; Dayton Peace Agreement, 74–80, 86–88, 92–99, 102, 111–112, 150, 152, 155 (See also Dayton Peace Agreement); Constitution of, 75, 77–78; Electoral system, 77–78; and international actors, 79–81 (See also OSCE and OHR); Environmental complexity in, 81–84; HDZ and

party formation in, 84–92; HDZ and electoral competition, 99–101, 141–154; SDS party formation, 92–98, 105–107, 141–154; SDS and electoral politics, 101–102, 107, 111; Local politics in, 102–111, 122–123 Boutros-Ghali, Boutros: 14 Boycotts: electoral by Renamo, 44, 52, 57–59; of parliament by Renamo, 44, 52, 57–58, 60; of elections by HDZ, 90; of cantonal government by Bosniak politicians, 107; of inauguration of Saca, 133 Breakaway parties: 92, 102, 123, 126, 138–139, 152 Calderón Sol, Armando: 120 Candidate-based elections: 115, 147 Candidate selection: 38–41, 147; in FMLN, 129–131, 134, 139 Canjura Rene: 133 Cantonal government in Bosnia: 82, 89, 90, 92, 100–101, 103–107, 112, 148 C˘avić, Dragan: 98 CD: 118, 120, 122–123, 128, 132, 138 CDU: 123, 138 Ceasefire: in Mozambique, 47; in El Salvador, 118 Centralization: of parties, 35–36, 43, 47, 50, 61, 69, 95, 107, 127, 151 Challenges: for party leaders in general, 7–11, 13, 26–29, 32, 34–43, 144,

194 Index Challenges—continued 148, 150–152, 154; for Renamo leadership, 49–50, 56, 60, 67, 69, 71; for SDS and HDZ, 74, 83–4, 86–88, 93, 99–102, 107, 111–112, 115, 120–124 Collective incentives: 30, 88, 101–102 Communist Party, El Salvador: 116–117, 125 Competitiveness, electoral: 3, 8, 29, 30, 32, 123, 146, 147, 154 Complexity: environmental 20, 29–30, 33, 43, 55, 76, 81, 83–84, 122–123, 144–147, 151, 154; organizational, 20, 151 COMURES: 132, 135, 136 Conference, party: Renamo, 64; SDS, 94, 96 Consolidation, democratic and parties 3, 22, 25, 27 Constituencies: for reform within parties: 8, 20, 23, 26–27, 33, 38, 41, 71, 77, 81, 84, 88, 90, 94–95, 121, 138, 142, 144, 147–148, 151–155, 148, 148, 151, 151, 152, 152, 153, 153, 154, 154, 155 Constitutional: design, 6, 142; reform in Mozambique, 48; Court in Mozambique, 59, 67; framework in Mozambique, 50, 55; reform in Bosnia, 92, 107; Court in Bosnia, 76, 97; framework in Bosnia, 75–78, 90–92, 100–103, 111, 150; in El Salvador, 121, 142 Convention, party: HDZ, 91; SDS, 98; FMLN, 127. See also Conference, party COPAZ: 119 C˘ović, Dragan: 91, 92 Croatia: 7, 10, 73, 74, 76, 85–88, 91–92, 100, 141, 152 Cuellar, Javier Perez: 118

Dayton Peace Agreement: 74–80, 83, 86–88, 92–99, 102, 111–112, 150, 152, 155 Decentralization: in Bosnia, 103, 110, 122; in El Salvador, 122, 128 Democracy: 1–3, 5–6, 8, 10, 13–17, 20–27, 33, 37, 40–41, 47, 49, 55, 57, 62, 70, 91, 113, 129, 134, 138, 141–147, 154–155 Democratization: 1–3, 5–6, 14–18, 22, 24–25, 29, 39, 52, 91, 110, 141, 143–144, 148, 153, 155 Democratizers: 10, 16, 17 Deputies: Renamo, 45, 50, 51, 56, 58, 60–61, 63–64, 67; HDZ, 91; SDS, 96; FMLN, 121, 126, 129, 133–134, 148. See also parliamentarians and legislators Dhlakama, Afonso: 44–70, 133, 147, 151 Divisions: in political parties, 25, 27, 30, 33, 137, 142; in Renamo, 54, 78, 152; in HDZ and SDS, 84–85, 97; in FMLN, 125–127, 134, Dodik, Milorad: 82–83, 94, 95, 97, 155 Dominant coalition: 30, 33, 147; in Renamo, 30, 33; in HDZ, 74, 85, 86, 99; in SDS, 74, 93, 99, 102 Domingos, Raul: 45, 51, 55, 61, 64, 69 Donors: 9, 22, 25, 3 3, 142, 143, 146, 149; in Mozambique, 47–49, 51–53, 57, 62, 70; in Bosnia, 80, 81, 84, 95; in El Salvador, 129, 130, 135, 136, 137 Duarte, Jose Napoleon: 117, 120 Economy: 7, 16, 66, 70, 100, 120, 132 Elections: and democratic statebuilding, 1–10, 142–155; and party development, 13–32, 142–155; in multiple political arenas, 32–36; and challenges to party leaders, 37–40; in Mozambique, 43–70; in Bosnia, 73–112; in El Salvador, 112–138

Index 195 Electoralism: 2–3, 7–8, 13–16, 20–22, 24, 38, 40, 73, 93, 95, 112–113, 138, 150, 153 Elites: 3, 17, 21, 23, 28, 36, 63, 88, 89, 99, 102, 115, 116, 118, 129, 141 El Salvador: 7–10, 22, 114–48; Impact of electoralism on parties in, 115–116, 124–135; Civil war, 116–118; Formation of FMLN, 116–118; Peace agreement, 118–119; Election results in, 119–121; Constitutional framework, 121–122; Party system, 121–122; Environmental complexity for FMLN, 122–124; Local government and FMLN, 135–138 Environment: parties’ external: 4–6, 15, 18, 21, 28–31, 33–37, 143–147, 150, 151, 154; Renamo’s, 41–44, 53–55, 70; for HDZ and SDS, 74, 81, 83–4, 88; for FMLN, 122–123 Ethnonationalism: 79, 110 Ethnonationalist: 73, 88 European: 22, 33, 52, 75, 91, 98, 103, 152 Executive office: 4, 18, 33, 50, 80, 94, 104, 110, 128, 136 Extremist: 15, 79, 96 Factions: 1, 23, 30, 32–33, 36, 38, 147, 152, 155; of Renamo, 46, 53; in HDZ and SDS, 90, 95, 96, 109–111; in FMLN, 123–124, 132, 139 Farabundo Marti Liberation Front: 7, 115, 141. See also FMLN FDR: 133, 138 Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina: 75–76, 80, 82–83, 86, 88–90, 92, 100–101, 103–109, 150 Flores, Francisco: 124, 136 FMLN: 7–10, 69, 115–139, 142, 144, 147–155 FPL: 117, 124, 125

Frelimo: 43–46, 48–71 Gonzalez, Medardo: 133 Governance: of parties, 15, 25, 32, 37; participation in, 147, 142, 144, 146; in or by Renamo, 44, 50, 56; in Bosnia, 75, 92, 102, 109–110; in El Salvador, 121–122, 127–130, 135, 136 Governors: 58, 121, 128, 135 General Peace Accord (GPA), Mozambique: 43, 57 Guardado, Facundo: 126, 127, 129, 134 Guebuza, Armando Emilio: 51, 54, 59–60, 70, 154 Guerrilla: 51, 115, 124 Habituation: 7, 141 Hague: 87 Handal, Schafik: 116, 126, 131–134, 137 Hardliners: 93, 95, 118, 144, 149 HDZ: 7–9, 69, 73–78, 81–94, 99–112, 123, 134, 138, 141, 144, 147 HDZ-Croatia: 87–88, 91 Herceg-Bosna: 76, 86, 100 Hercegovacka: 89 Herzegovina: 72, 74–75, 77, 83, 85–86, 90–91, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 109, 139, 152 Herzeg-Neretva: 107 Identity: party collective, 9, 13, 21, 27, 30, 38–40, 141–2, 147, 149, 153, 155; Renamo party, 54, 66; HDZ and SDS party, 102, 105, 110, 112; FMLN party, 116, 123–126, 134 Ideological: 14, 21, 23, 115–117, 125–127, 154 Ideology: 9, 30, 124–127, 132, 137, 155 Incentives: 3, 13, 19, 23–24, 26, 30, 32–33, 37, 53, 69, 77, 80, 88, 101–103, 129, 143, 145–146 155

196 Index Incumbent: 2, 4, 9, 24–25, 27–28, 32, 34–37, 40, 52, 62, 83, 86, 110, 112, 120, 126, 133–134, 138–139, 145, 148, 150, 153, 155 Independence: 45, 62–63, 97, 150 Indictees: 87 Infrastructure: 32, 45, 54, 121–122 Institutionalization: 3, 13, 19, 23, 35–36, 39, 112, 151 Insurgency: 45, 46, 117, 121 Intellectuals: 64–66, 117 Interests: 2, 5, 16, 20, 21, 23–24, 56, 64, 77–78, 83, 85–88, 94–95, 99, 102, 104, 107, 111, 129, 135–137, 147–49, 155, 155 Inter-ethnic: 106 Interparty: 4, 8–10, 24–25, 29–30, 4154, 56, 70–71, 84, 89, 103, 112, 142, 144, 148, 150, 153–155 Intervention: 8, 15–16, 18, 49, 79, 80–81, 84, 88–89, 111, 136, 149 Intraelite: 63, 89 Intraparty: 25, 31, 71, 112, 125, 131 Iraq: 15 Ivanić, Mladen: 95 Jelavić, Ante: 87, 89, 90, 91 Kalinić, Dragan: 95, 96, 101, 108 Karad˘zić: 75, 93, 96, 97 Kosovo: 150 Krajina: 86 Leftist: 117, 134 Legacies: 8, 17, 142 Legislation: 37, 52, 55–56, 60–61, 75, 100, 104, 135–136 Legislative: 4, 18, 21, 32, 43–44, 47–48, 50–51, 55–56, 58, 61–62, 64–65, 77, 82, 90–91, 93, 118–127, 131–132, 137–138, 151, 153 Legislators: 112, 133–134, 146, 148, 151. See also Deputies Legislature: 9, 44, 50, 51, 55–57, 60, 63, 70, 93, 96, 104, 115, 119, 120,

121, 126, 128–129, 135–137, 139, 142, 147, 148. See also Assembly Legitimacy: 2, 9, 15, 21, 30, 44, -49, 53, 133 Legitimation: 142 Leverage: 40, 48, 55, 58, 61, 62, 68, 80, 85, 99, 107, 143, 147 Liberalization: 3, 19, 52 Ljubic, Bozo: 91–92 Majority: 43, 44, 50, 52, 54–55, 58, 60, 63–64, 75–76, 8–83, 89–91, 94, 96, 100, 104, 127, 146 Maputo: 50, 59, 64, 65 Marxist: 117 Massacres: 46, 109 Mayors: 32–33, 148; in Mozambique, 55; in Bosnia, 82, 104, 1–110; in El Salvador, 120–122, 126, 138 Media: 4, 8, 10, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20–21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41, 47, 58, 66, 68, 75, 86, 93, 106, 131, 138 Mediators: 8, 13, 15, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 75, 86 Merdzo, Josip: 90–92, 123 Mexico: 2, 18, 25, 32–33, 116 Militants, party: 24, 105, 118, 125–126 Minority: 15, 32–33, 57, 75–76, 80, 86, 88, 96, 99, 120 Mocambique: 62 Mocimboa da Praia: 62 Mocuba: 62 Moderates: 77, 79, 83, 125–126, 155 Momade, Ossufo: 65 Mondlane, Eduardo: 64, 67 Mostar: 80, 89, 101, 105, 107 Mozambican: 46–49, 51–52, 54, 82, 148 Mozambique: 7, 10; Civil war in, 45–50; Renamo party formation and development in, 48–50, 63–71; Peace agreement, 47–50 (See also GPA); Constitutional framework, 50–51; International actors, 51–53

Index 197 (See also donors); Environmental complexity for Renamo in, 53–56; Impact of electoralism on party development, 56–63, 68–71; Renamo behavior in Assembly of the Republic in, 60–61 Mulembwe, Eduardo: 61 Multiethnic: 18, 73, 76, 83, 85, 103, 109 Multiparty: 16, 43, 47, 57, 60, 66–70, 112, 149, 154 Municipal government and elections: 28, 32, 47, 50, 62, 70, 75–76, 80–84, 87, 89, 90, 91, 100–138, 147–148, 153 Namburete, Eduardo: 67 Nationalism: 79, 83, 92, 98, 110, 141, 149 Nejapa: 120, 133 Neoliberal: 16 NGOs: 45, 51, 55, 61, 64, 69, 130, 136, 137 NHI: 82, 152 Ninkovic: 108 observers: 39, 47, 58, 59, 65, 73, 120, 130, 132, 134 office-maximizing: 124, 155 OHR (Office of the High Representative): 73, 75, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 89, 90, 96–98 Opposition: 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 18, 19, 24, 25–26, 33–34, 43, 44, 49, 52–55, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65–68, 70, 74, 75, 93, 96, 102, 107, 111, 112, 117, 122, 123, 136, 137, 138, 141–147, 150, 153, 154 Orthodox: 9, 116, 124, 125–127, 131–134, 137–138, 148, 152 Ortiz, Oscar: 126, 129, 130–133 OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe): 73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84, 89, 106, 107, 108, 109

Paramilitary: 108, 117 Parliament: 4, 9, 24, 26, 28, 32, 33, 39, 44, 45, 47, 49–51, 53, 54–61, 63–71, 91–96, 104, 126, 129, 131, 133, 143, 148, 152, 154 Parliamentarians: 39, 51. See also Deputies and Legislators PCN: 120, 122 PCS: 117 PDC: 120–122, 132 PDD: 55, 68 PDP: 82, 95, 97 Peace-keeping: 76 Personalized: 21, 36, 43, 44, 47, 61, 68, 69, 151 PMR: 126 Polarization: 18, 24, 53–54, 60, 62, 69, 70, 105, 123, 127, 145, 149 Polarized: 8, 20, 4, 122, 151 Polls: 57, 60, 63, 81, 97, 118, 121, 131, 131, 149, 149 Portugal: 47, 49, 65 Presidential: 32, 33, 47, 50, 51, 60, 62, 68, 116, 119, 121–127, 132–134, 138 Primaries, party: 127, 131, 132 Privatization: 109, 116 Prlic, Jadranko: 152 PRTC: 117, 124, 125 Quelimane: 67 Quezaltepeque: 129 Rebel: 1, 49, 62, 118–119, 122 Reconstruction: 14, 121–122 Recruitment: 38–39, 65, 110 Reformist: 9, 68, 80, 91, 95–96, 98, 116, 124–126, 129, 130–133, 137–138, 148–149, 152–155 Refugees: 45, 75, 95 Renamo: 7–10, 31, 35, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50–71, 92, 101, 123, 133, 134, 138, 141, 144, 147, 148, 151–154 Renovadores (wing of FMLN): 126

198 Index Republika Srpska: 75, 82, 86, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 147, 154 Resources, party: 6, 9, 10, 13, 16, 21, 22, 27, 28, 31–34, 48–49, 52, 54, 88, 92–93, 102, 112, 121, 128, 130, 137, 142–143, 145, 150 Responses, party leaderships’: 13, 26, 36–41, 56, 133 Rightist: 121 Rule-making: 20, 30, 69 Rule stability: 33, 84, 123, 142, 144, 150 Ruling party: 24–26, 43–44, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 64–68, 70–71, 96–97, 106, 112, 115, 122, 135, 142, 145, 149, 151, 153 Saca, Antonio: 132–133 Sant’Egidio: 47 Sarovic, Mirko: 97, 108 SDS: 7–9, 39, 69, 73–77, 81–85, 91–112, 123, 138, 141, 144, 147, 148, 150–155 Security dilemma: 94–102 Selective incentives: 32 Selectorate: 38 Senegal: 25 Serbs: 7, 10, 39, 73–79, 82–83, 86, 92–101, 103–104, 108–109, 111–112, 141, 149, 150 Serbia: 7, 10, 39, 73, 74, 76, 92, 93, 95, 100, 112, 141, 150

SNS: 77, 82, 83, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 111, 144, 152, 155 SNSD: 77, 82–83, 94–98, 111, 144, 155 Socioeconomic factors: 6, 17, 24, 54, 79, 94, 125, 145 Sofala: 46–47 Soviet: 6, 20 Soyapango: 135 Spain: 52 Split, with party: 25, 32, 33, 82, 85, 93, 94, 104, 123, 125, 126, 127, 151, 152 Spoilers: 34 STAE (Technical Secretariat for the Administration of Elections— Mozambique): 56 Structural factors: 6, 16, 17, 18, 54, 74, 145, 149, 150, 153, 155 Tambara, Almeida: 68 Transformation, party: 3, 20, 48–49, 57, 131, 155 UNOMOZ: 47 USAID: 121, 130 Villalobos, Joaquin: 124 Voting: 5, 38–39, 53, 57–59, 62, 77, 99, 109, 120, 123, 145 Zambezia: 46–47, 59 Zimbabwe: 45 Zubak, Kresimir: 86, 87, 152

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