Peacebuilding and Gender Representation: Evidence from Colombia's Peace Process

• In Event: Peacebuilding

Abstract

What are the impacts of peacebuilding after a long-lasting war on political mobilization and the quality of democratic representation? We explore this question in the context of the 2016 Colombian Peace Agreement using the patterns of political participation and representation at the local level in the most affected regions. This agreement demobilized more six thousand fighters and created a series of special “peace zones” (containing 170 municipalities, 36% of Colombia’s territory). The efforts of the Colombian state to stabilize and transform the areas most affected by the conflict were concentrated in these zones. Particularly interesting is that the agreement contained a gender component, which was controversial among conservative sectors and opponents of the deal. We explore the effectiveness of these peace efforts on the incidence of women's leadership and political representation. We use a spatial regression discontinuity design to identify the impact of the peace deal on these attributes. Specifically, taking neighboring municipalities as controls we estimate the impact of the peace agreement on the incidence of women candidates and their electoral success. We find that the agreement had a positive and significant impact on descriptive representation. On average, municipalities in peace zones had more women candidates and were 1.5 times more likely to have a woman elected either as mayor or municipal council member. Moreover, these findings hold for the most recent round of local elections (2023). Thus, although the peace programs were stalled by the opposition in the last years, these had a positive and persistent impact on the quality of local democracy.

Author

• Mario Chacon, EAFIT University