political institutions and violence are jointly determined. We take advantage of an experiment of history to examine the impact … violence in nineteenth-century Colombia was a technology for political elites to compete for the rents from power, and that … democracy constituted an alternative way to compete which substituted violence …

broader relationship between democracy and violence. The chapter studies some of the most important democratization reforms … since Colombia's independence 200 years ago. It argues that the reforms often failed to curb violence and sometimes even …