Election Day, then and now, there and here

0.5 hours writing, 6 hours reading / researching

This week's blog monitor is Nicole Peterson, in Seattle. As she rightly asks, "how to capture all this greatness in TWO LINES?" I met Nicole when she lived in the Bay Area, and was immediately struck by her great sense of humor. While she doesn't know very much about my overall dissertation subject, she's very interested in learning more, so she'll be watching me like a hawk. Welcome, Nicole!

After a couple of weeks spent at the macro level working on the chapters about the police and Colombia in comparative perspective, today was all about the micro. There's a ton of great stuff in the Interior Ministry report to Congress from 1946. It was an election year, when power changed hands from Liberals to Conservatives, with one of the largest third-party electoral showings in Colombian history, right on the edge of conflict. So the fix-it ministry had its hands full, trying to forestall electoral fraud, reorganizing police pensions, and tracking election results. You couldn't sell liquor within 48 hours of the election, no one could congregate around polling places or pass out materials, and you weren't allowed to travel between towns by road or rail on election day - it actually says in the report, "so people can't vote twice." Reminds me of a cool documentary I saw at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival a few weeks ago, which will be coming out on PBS next year: Election Day, where film crews followed the evolving stories at more than a dozen polling places across the country on election day 2004. Poll watchers facing off, poor folks struggling with barriers to voting, allegations of vote-fixing, haggles over the minutiae of electoral law: it's all there, USA 2004, Colombia 1946.

And in the latter, the police are right in the thick of it. What's interesting is that even in the ministerial decrees about the role of the police in maintaining order on election day, it's not clear which level of police: national, state, or local. Sometimes national are specified, but often it's just "the Police." Worth looking into further, but it's notable already the slippage between levels.

I looked at the town-by-town results for a couple of the states I'm interested in, and interestingly, the third-party candidate, a dissident Liberal with a populist rhetotic, got a lot of support in the Atlantic Coast states, which are peaceable and predominantly Liberal, but not a lot of play in Santander, a province with a history of contentiousness and Liberal tendencies. Santander has a lot of variation, with a few Conservative strongholds, strong presence of the left in a few of the larger towns, and three towns where the party affiliation flipped entirely between the October 1945 municipal elections and the 1946 presidential elections. Social scientists love variation within a particular set of cases, because it gives us something interesting to explain. So I started writing up some reactions to these data in the context of the chapter on La Violencia. I'll continue in this vein tomorrow....