Testify

5 hours reading / researching

I finished going through the Interior Ministry reports to Congress for 1946 and 1947, which have a lot of electoral data, at the town level. Gradually, I'm piecing together how the very complicated Colombian electoral system works. I have town-level data for three elections, 1945, 1946, and 1947, and they're all for different levels of government: municipal, presidential, and congressional. The last is the trickiest because it involves the system of proportional representation, which is entirely different from what we have in the States, and comes in 31 flavors, to boot. Basically, instead of the majority vote-getter in a particular district winning all the seats, parties get seats in proportion to their vote share. At one point, there was an idea floating around that this led to greater stability, but that turns out not necessarily to be the case. PR, as it's called, leads to parties putting together tickets that cover national, regional, and local elections, and identifying certain candidates, ones with broad name recognition, at the "top" of the list, so it's like people are voting for that person, but then all the other candidates associated for that list. There are variations where you can itemize who on the list you choose rather than selecting them all together. I'm not 100% sure which flavor was in place in Colombia at the time, so I'll need to look into that.

Why are electoral patterns important for the police? Because it's in the struggle over electoral politics that mayors and governors bring in the police, and use them as tools to advance political agendas.

Also finished reading a great book about the local-level reactions to the assassination of Gaitan in the provinces outside Bogota. It's becoming increasingly clear that the picture at the local level in terms of the security forces' involvement in La Violencia is extremely complex and variable. At first I was modeling the police exclusively as a tool of the government, but now I'm starting to think that it may be like a random variable; that sometimes it allies with the government and sometimes with rebels. In game theory, a "mixed strategy," otherwise known as complete randomness, can be a useful move when you're trying to signal to others your intentions to commit to a particular policy, or when you're trying to ward off a threat from them. If you just choose randomly between A and B, protect or rebel, at any given time, then others have a hard time figuring out their strategies, because they can't predict yours.

Finally, I noticed that a lot of good material in the book I finished today came from legal testimony given in court cases where rebels were brought to trial. Hadn't thought of that as a source, could be useful....