Cardona
MPSA 2004
27
look at the interaction between the structure of the public forces and the dynamics of
party competition.
In thinking about how we might apply the insights gleaned from this case study
more generally, the issue of the relative balance between the two parties seems
paramount. How do the dynamics described above change when one party is dominant?
How are they different when more than two parties exist? How about a
desinstitutionalized context in which party factions do not coalesce into stable
organizations over time? What seems important for the balance of regime stability during
La Violencia is the ability of all local actors to have access to their own forms of militia,
whether through the public forces or privately. Local incumbents always had available to
them forces to hold off insurrection, but the local-level nature of the struggle appears to
have prevented these conflicts from aggregating up.
With these factors in mind, at least two kinds of comparisons suggest themselves.
One is to countries in which there exists a relative imbalance in the struggle for partisan
dominance: Chile might be such an example, particularly given its early experience with
centralization of the army. The trajectories of Chile’s police and national guard are less
well understood, and a comparison with Colombia may help to flesh out these dynamics.
Another type of comparison would be to a country where the partial collapse of the state
devolved into a total collapse: Mexico during the Revolution or Bolivia in 1952 seem like
useful points of comparison in this regard. In developing my dissertation, I have framed a
dual comparison with Chile and Mexico, and hope to apply the framework developed in
this paper to that larger project.
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