When is democracy an equilibrium?

…democracy may only be stable when one group is dominant.  We provide a test of a key aspect of our model using data from "La Violencia", a political conflict in Colombia during the years 1946-1950 between the Liberal and Conservative parties.  Consistent with our results, and contrary to the conventional wisdom, we show that fighting between the parties was more intense in municipalities where the support of the parties was more evenly balanced.

Here is the paper, here is a non-gated version.

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