Five Questions on Democracy and Violence

The findings of Daly’s book seem counterintuitive. Why would a party with a violent past be able to appeal to voters? What is the evidence for such a claim?

One might expect that if elections are free and fair, voters will punish parties associated with civil war violence. Daly questions that assumption. She argues that in countries coming out of violent civil wars, voters prioritize security above all else. Parties that decisively won a civil war can claim credit for ending the violence and credibly signal they are highly competent providers of order. She shows that this security appeal reaches beyond core supporters and can attract swing voters and even former victims. In Guatemala and El Salvador, for example, parties responsible for about 90 percent of the violence still won 40 percent or more of their victims’ votes.

Violent victors appeal to voters through credible security promises, moderate policy platforms, and efforts to whitewash their violent record. Meanwhile, those that lost the war are blamed for past violence and are less able to signal competence in the security realm. Those violent losers often end up adopting non-security or niche platforms. In a survey experiment in Colombia, she finds that when a belligerent victor successfully brings peace, respondents are significantly more likely to view excessive use of force as justified. Importantly, this effect is even stronger among former victims than among those who were not directly affected by the violence. Case studies of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, as well as cross-national global data, align with these surprising findings.

An implication from the book is that “violent victors” may help the process of democratic transition and peace building. But an important caveat is that achieving security can come at the expense of transitional justice and full democratic accountability, especially as belligerent victors block efforts to hold past perpetrators of violence accountable.

Different types of violence may matter here. You have a section devoted to findings on the relationship between state repression and democracy. What does that literature show?

Civil war is only one way societies experience large-scale violence. State repression appears to be different. Although findings are mixed, parties responsible for state repression are more likely to be punished at the polls. Communities previously exposed to repression often vote against parties associated with former perpetrators and regime elites. In some cases, like Ukraine after the Stalin-era famine, the legacy of mass repression can persist for decades and shape voter behavior even across multiple generations once the threat of retribution subsides.

Why the difference? Civil war violence is often multi-sided compared to state repression, which could make it harder to identify perpetrators. Civil wars also leave behind an especially powerful demand for security that can override concerns about democracy or transitional justice. State repression may not have the same salience.

At the same time, even if security or accountability dominates voter concerns, individual-level attitudes do not automatically translate into political outcomes. How those individual preferences shape elections in new democracies depends crucially on the political parties that organize and channel them.

Your own work explores the fate of authoritarian successor parties and what you call opposition successor parties. What do we know about those types of parties in contrast to Daly’s “belligerent parties”?

I look at opposition groups that fought for democracy under authoritarian rule and then compete in elections after democratization. I call these opposition successor parties (OSPs), in contrast with authoritarian successor parties (ASPs) that stem from former authoritarian regime elites. Unlike Daly’s bloodstained parties, which fought for territorial control, power, or regime survival, OSPs emerge from struggles that explicitly demanded democratization at the national level and were often nonviolent.

I use original party-election level data covering nine democracies in Asia and study why some OSPs in the region go on to become major political forces after democratic transition, while many others fade quickly. Counterintuitively, I find that OSPs are more likely to survive and perform better where ASPs remain strong. This is not because strong ASPs themselves promote fair democratic competition. Especially in the earlier years of democracy, ASPs often hinder it by leveraging inherited resources. Rather, OSPs tend to succeed over the long run through their own sustained efforts to strengthen party organizations, broaden their support base, and build clearer programmatic appeals to voters.

Can you give a concrete example? I understand your work goes into some detail on the Korean case.

South Korea illustrates this well. In 1987, the opposition appeared quite strong when nationwide mass protests forced Chun Doo-hwan’s government to step down and accept democratic reforms. But the ruling party​ played a key role in shaping the terms of the transition, including the constitution and electoral rules. It also inherited substantial financial resources, along with party infrastructure and media influence built during authoritarian rule.

Meanwhile, OSPs entered the new democratic system relatively under-resourced and organizationally weak. After decades of authoritarian divide-and-rule tactics, the two main opposition parties remained deeply divided. When one of them merged with the ruling party in 1990, the balance tilted even further in favor of the authoritarian successor party. But over time, the remaining OSP consolidated into one of the country’s two major parties. In many elections, it has outperformed its authoritarian successor rival.

My research shows that this long-term growth resulted from sustained efforts by OSPs to overcome inherited disadvantages, including expanding their grassroots networks and strengthening local party organizations. For example, the party created training programs like “Pyeong-min University” for party members and future candidates and built ties with civil society groups by forming an External Cooperation Committee. These efforts helped the party broaden its candidate pool and develop clearer policy platforms, contributing to its long-term competitiveness in elections.

You close with a somewhat pessimistic discussion of revolution. We tend to think of revolutions as social efforts to overturn unjust social orders. But you also draw on arguments that revolutionary violence can have lasting authoritarian consequences. Why is that?

Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s book Revolution and Dictatorship asks why authoritarian regimes born out of social revolutions are exceptionally durable, looking at twenty such cases, including China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam. They find that attempts at radical social transformation often provoke violent counterrevolutionary reactions that pose existential threats to the revolutionaries. Surviving that struggle produces a highly cohesive ruling elite and strong coercive institutions while eliminating rival organizations; think of China in the wake of its revolution under Mao. Attempts at toppling these regimes, let alone achieving democratization, are much more likely to fail.

After civil wars end, violent victors can win votes by framing their battlefield success as competence in the security realm. In the aftermath of state repression, voters often punish parties associated with former perpetrators and regime elites. Unlike both civil wars and state repression, social revolutions concentrate power in ways that make democratization much more difficult in the first place. In that sense, revolutionary violence tends to leave far less room for democratic development. The bottom line is that the effects of violence on the prospects of democracy are not uniform; they depend on the type of violence a society has gone through.

Yeilim Cheong is the Korea Foundation endowed assistant professor at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, and a former IGCC Dissertation Fellow (2024-2025).

Thumbnail credit: Wikimedia Commons