Colombia’s Power-Sharing Democracy

My grandfather often tells me stories of Colombia back in the 60s. One that particularly shocks me is that every four years, when there was an election, everyone already knew which party would win because it was simply its turn. After a decade of partisan violence and a brief military dictatorship, the Liberal and Conservative parties had agreed to stop competing and share power through a pact known as the Frente Nacional. For 16 years, the presidency alternated between the two parties, and Congress, the cabinet, and the courts were split 50/50. Elections still took place, and any citizen could vote, but only candidates from the party on turn could run. The median voter logic didn't disappear; it was constrained. Factions within the governing party had to compete for the whole electorate, so the winner tended to be the candidate closest to the median, but only within that party's ideological range. Voters outside that range abstained from voting, creating a bias and moving the median of actual voters further from the assumed median citizen. 

In the short run, the Frente worked. Before the pact, the two parties were trapped in a prisoner's dilemma: each was better off using violence to capture the state, since holding back while the other attacked meant losing everything, yet mutual violence left both worse off. The power-sharing agreement broke this dilemma and partisan violence fell sharply. But by solving one conflict, the system created a much larger one. Downs argues that new parties emerge when the distribution of voters' ideological views shifts, and existing parties leave part of the space uncovered. Colombia experienced exactly this shift: a growing number of farmers were migrating to the cities, and ideas from the Cuban Revolution and the Soviet Union were arriving through political propaganda, creating a new left-leaning constituency. In a competitive system, a new party would have entered that gap. Since electoral entry was blocked, the entry happened outside the system, through armed movements like the FARC. The Frente ended a partisan civil war, but in doing so it helped lay the groundwork for a new civil war that would last half a century.