Much of English-language writing on contemporary Colombia focuses on that country's extended armed conflict and the challenges posed by international drug trafficking to both hemispheric security and local political stability. Often overlooked, however, are the dynamics of Colombia's long-standing democratic political system. In his book, Steven L. Taylor offers readers a detailed discussion of the constitutional structure of party competition in one of Latin America's oldest democracies. Taylor is a capable scholar of Colombia's institutions and does an excellent job of shedding light on the complex interplay between parties in that country's evolving electoral system.

The author makes two key arguments. First, he suggests that “institutional change has mattered in Colombia's politics and specifically that as the rules of the game changed, power-seeking actors altered their behaviors in response” (p. 164). Second, he states that “[e]lections do matter. Indeed, despite the contentious … nature of Colombian politics, the electoral process is remarkably sound” (p. 165). The case for the first argument is stronger than the second. Taylor tells a compelling story about how a shift in the method of proportional seat allotment for the national legislature affected the evolution of the Colombian party system. However, he fails to provide a deeper discussion of the subnational aspects of that competition, key in Colombia's heavily regionalized political system, and his compartmentalization of violence principally into one later chapter provides, at times, a flat view of political life that sees violence primarily as a hindrance to democracy rather than as an active component of Colombia's electoral and governance systems.

Taylor begins his analysis with a model, based on the work of Larry Diamond, that seeks to use 10 variables to measure the strength of Colombia's democratic system.Footnote ¹ These variables include 1) control of the state by elected officials; 2) constitutional constraints on executive power; 3) the uncertainty of electoral outcomes; 4) minority rights; 5) associative rights; 6) access to information; 7) access of individuals to democratic freedoms; 8) equality under the law; 9) judicial independence in the adjudication of civil and political liberties; and 10) the rule of law. Taylor concludes that 1 and 2 are “present,” 3 through 9 are “present but limited by violence,” and 10 is “absent in large portions of the country.”

In using this model, and in labeling so many elements of that system as “present but limited,” Taylor repeats a common and, in the Colombian context, counterproductive trope in much of the literature of democracy in developing countries that sees fully realized democracy as a less violent alternative to other forms of government. In doing so, Taylor explicitly imposes a teleology on democratic experience, writing that Colombia “is an electoral democracy in search of status as a liberal democracy” (p. 37). Colombian leaders may publicly aspire to “liberal” democracy, but it is not at all clear that they agree on how to get there. Indeed, the country has been mired in armed conflict since the 1950s, at least in part because there are basic disagreements about the shape of the political system.Footnote ² Further, while political actors may claim to aspire to particular democratic ideals, ample evidence suggests that actual Colombian political practice is highly violent, with politicians and armed actors using arms to systematically manipulate electoral outcomes.

Voting Amid Violence, with its focus on national-level politics, touches only lightly on key subnational issues that would have helped to flesh out the connections between political practice and armed conflict. In his chapter on violence, Taylor devotes a half paragraph to violence against municipal officials, noting: “Clearly, a career in politics is not necessarily the safest choice one can make in Colombia. There can therefore be little doubt that many otherwise qualified persons have eschewed politics, which is a detriment to a healthy democracy” (p. 156). This brief treatment fails to look at key ways that the constitutional changes in 1991, which empowered municipalities, also had the effect of promoting violence against municipal officials in wide swaths of the country.

The election of mayors beginning in 1988 and governors in 1991 has had a profound impact on Colombian politics. On the positive side, mayors of major cities have had the flexibility to implement innovative local policies that today serve as models for other countries and, in the case of Antanas Mockus of Bogota, have helped launch a national political career. Scholars, however, note that these constitutional reforms have also led to a mandated distribution of some resources from the national government to subnational governments, making some municipalities compelling targets for armed groups seeking rents.Footnote ³ That funding then serves to finance further illegal operations, threatens other members of the political system, and systematically shapes how voters in certain regions of the country can participate in elections. It is not that running for office is risky and that the failure of some solid candidates to run hurts Colombian democracy but, rather, that armed actors have successfully employed democratic institutional opportunities to further their military and strategic agendas. It is not so much that violence is a limitation on democracy as it is that the power and legitimacy established through ostensibly democratic competition is a tool that armed groups use to secure control over subnational governments and resources.

In his discussion of the role of armed actors in politics, Taylor argues that such relationships can “damage” the “fabric of democracy,” serve as a “corrupting influence,” and “create a great deal of difficulty for the quality of democracy” (p. 155). This framing, consistent with earlier arguments, suggests that democracy itself, properly practiced, is, by nature, fairly peaceful. Evidence from Colombia, however, suggests the politicians have regularly used illegal violence to win elections at the municipal, regional, and national levels. Indeed, one-third of the legislators elected to the congress in 2002 and 2006 have been investigated for connections with armed actors. The majority of these legislators were aligned with former President Alvaro Uribe and made up one-half of his congressional coalition.Footnote ⁴ Despite three years of investigations on this issue, there are now accusations against approximately one-third of the members elected to both houses of congress in 2010.Footnote ⁵

Close analyses (completed in 2007) of voting patterns in Colombia and, in particular, of Antioquia, Colombia's most populous department, suggest that paramilitaries have become part and parcel of the very democratic structures analyzed by Taylor. For example, in Chapter 6, he discusses how 1991 constitutional reforms affected strategies to win a seat in the national senate. He argues that they had the effect of weakening traditional department-based clientelist structures since party electoral barons could no longer rely on a captive regional vote to win office. Research on the 2002 and 2006 elections in Antioquia shows that the new electoral rules put pressure on local elites to establish tighter political alliances with paramilitaries that would, in turn, use force to re-establish geographically constrained electoral districts by intimidating opponents, threatening and displacing opposition supporters, and simply stealing votes. Between 1997 and 2002, 226,646 Antioqueños, about 5% of the department's population, suffered forcible displacement.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, consistent with Taylor's analysis of the use of multiplying party lists and independent parties to win seats cheaply through “least remainders” in electoral apportionment systems, evidence from the Parapolitica Scandal also suggests that armed groups have used the proliferating array of small parties to tightly control voting in certain portions of the country, while simultaneously seeking to insulate allies in more mainstream parties from direct partisan contact with paramilitary-connected politicians. Paramilitary-tied parties learned from previous electoral experience in 2002 how to more effectively configure party distribution in order to optimize the votes they controlled in the country.Footnote ⁷

Thus, institutions do matter, but they matter in the broader context of how the control over violence is distributed across national territory and how that violence coexists with other forms of political practice. Armed actors and political power brokers utilized institutional reforms intended to make Colombia a stronger democracy to reproduce systems of dominance in rural areas. Indeed, the discussion here suggests that those institutional reforms had the effect of driving local political elites to seek armed support to more effectively control their electoral destiny in light of the growing localized power of armed actors and new institutional arrangements that rendered older patronage practices obsolete.Footnote ⁸

Voting Amid Violence is an important addition to the English-language writing on Colombia. The book provides scholars and students unfamiliar with Colombia with solid information on that country's political system and brings to the center those elements of Colombia's political structure largely overlooked in discussions focused on drug trafficking and armed conflict. At the same time, however, the book treats Colombia's conflict as something antithetical to its political system. Closer examinations of subnational data suggest that the use of violence is part and parcel of electoral competition in that country and that armed groups have had considerable success in adapting to, and utilizing, post-1988 political reforms to advance their strategic agendas.

Taylor's work would have been strengthened through an analysis of subnational political structures and a more robust treatment of municipal and departmental political competition, helping to flesh out the ways that violence intersects with and influences broader national political processes. The book would also have been strengthened if it could have moved beyond the theoretical armature so common in political science today of seeing violence as a deviation from democratic norms. While these might be descriptive norms of democratic practice in some countries, they are, as amply demonstrated by Colombia, not universal. Taylor is right; institutions do matter to party competition in Colombia but, despite considerable efforts from some elements of Colombian state and society, elections are far from “sound.” Indeed, shifting electoral rules are as important to major political parties and law-abiding politicians as they are to the armed actors that, in conjunction with some regional political elites, exercise armed dominance in many parts of the country. A conceptual approach that better reflects how violence is employed as a part of democratic practice in some countries can provide important leverage for understanding the complex dynamics of politics in Colombia.