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To what extent are legislators, responsible for the implementation of many peace agreements, responsive to citizens’ preferences? Natalia Garbiras-Díaz discusses the attitudes of the general population and residents of conflict-affected regions on a provision included in the peace agreement: the creation of 16 special seats in the House of Representatives reserved for conflict areas.

Image courtesy of interviewee. January 26, 2024

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This video video discusses the 2016 peace agreement in Colombia, signed between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), marking the end of over 50 years of civil conflict. The article examines the complex interplay of citizen and elite attitudes towards peace agreements, as well as the challenges in forming public opinion and the role of legislators in the process.

The peace agreement was initially rejected in a referendum but was later approved by Congress. The study highlights the importance of understanding how citizens and legislative elites form their preferences regarding peace agreements, especially in the context of security issues, where the connection between legislators and citizens tends to weaken.

The article's authors aimed to use an experimental design to analyze legislators' perceptions of public support for specific provisions of the peace agreement. They partnered with a Colombian NGO to conduct surveys to obtain direct insights from legislators, focusing on how well they understand citizens' attitudes toward various peace agreement provisions, including the creation of special congressional seats for conflict-affected areas.

Key findings indicate a misalignment between citizen support and legislative attitudes, often influenced by partisan lines. The study revealed that while citizens largely supported the provisions, legislators' support was polarized based on their political affiliation. Interestingly, providing legislators with accurate information about public support did not significantly change their positions.

Ultimately, the research underscores that while citizens play a critical role in the democratic process, their influence on policymakers, particularly in the context of peace agreements, is limited. The findings suggest a need for greater accountability and sensitivity among legislators to ensure that peace agreements are implemented effectively, highlighting the potential for conflict recurrence if such agreements are not honored. The research contributes to a broader understanding of the dynamics between citizen preferences, elite attitudes, and the stability of post-conflict peace arrangements.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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The context of this article is the 2016 peace agreement

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that was signed between the Colombian government

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and park, which was, aula group

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that was active since the 1960s in Colombia.

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So it was, a civil conflict that took place

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for more than 50 years.

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And that finally in 2016,

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after four years of negotiations was, ended.

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And, and this is kind of like the context, of course,

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this is not the first time that there's a peace agreement,

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but this gave us an opportunity for us to kind of like,

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understand a little bit more citizens' preferences

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and also elites preferences towards peace agreements.

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The negotiations took place for four years,

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and basically, back then, president Juan Santos decided

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that the final agreement was going to be approved

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through a play site.

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Um, the play site, the agreement was narrowly rejected

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by a very, very small margin.

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And after that, the peace agreement ended up being approved,

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through Congress.

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And so this is important, this is important information

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because actually it just points out how, like the importance

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of citizens, but also legislators throughout this process,

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not only at the, in the approval of the peace agreement,

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but also in the implementation,

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because the peace agreement ultimately that was approved,

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ended up being, basically approved piecemeal

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through Congress because each one of the, the,

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the provisions that had been included in the peace agreement

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had to be approved in Congress by legislators.

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So, so because of this specific context, we really wanted

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to understand the interplay of attitudes in these,

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and these agreements, as you might imagine,

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are complex documents.

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So you having a, a clear stance requires you to kind

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of like navigate thousands, not thousands,

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but hundreds of pages and under and,

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and come up with a clear stance.

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And so I think that part of the motivation be, be

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behind this, this, this piece that, by the way I have

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to mention is joint work with I from uc, Berkeley, and,

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and Miguel Garcia from the University of Los Angeles.

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Uh, we have this agenda on trying precisely to understand,

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yeah, how citizens

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and legislators,

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formed their attitudes towards this complex provisions

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that are usually included in agreements.

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And this, and Colombia was, an amazing opportunity

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because of the characteristics of the peace agreement

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to study these questions.

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So in this specific article that I'm talking about,

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we are interested, we're shifting focus from citizens.

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We have prior, papers working on specifically the,

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the role or how citizens form their attitudes in this case.

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And we have shown actually that citizens,

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because these are so complex, the provisions

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that are included, they tend to rely navigating

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through the information is really complicated.

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And many times citizens are at capacity, so it's really hard

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for them to take the time to just kind of like read

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and get fully informed.

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And so part of the, of the literature, the existing

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literature basically shows that citizens do use elite cues

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to form their opinions.

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And so precisely with my colleagues, Aila and,

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and Miguel, we have found that,

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and we have documented this in,

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some other published articles.

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And the idea for us was to kind of like, okay,

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granted these citizens really use elite cues.

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One question is, how do these elites,

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policy elites formed their attitudes?

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And so with regards to the, to a literature,

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there's a longstanding, literature studying the, the,

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the role of representation.

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What's the linkage between the elites

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and citizens under certain circumstances?

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There, the, the has shown that this link is stronger

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or weaker, preliminary evidence,

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not preliminary evidence, but there's actually, some

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evidence showing that in the case of the United States,

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for instance, poor voters tend to be less represented.

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Um, and then trying to expand this

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beyond the US case loop one Warner, for instance, showed

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that this is also present,

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across different countries in the world.

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So basically they collected sur surveys on ma the mass

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public and also elites,

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and showed that this pattern was still present in, in,

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outside the us in the case of Latin America,

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which is the region that, were investigated

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because this is a study in Colombia, this is even worse.

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So there, for instance, since back,

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to the studies done by O'Donnell who basically

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determined that he was saying basically that the, the,

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the way in which democracy works in Latin America, it's the,

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the negative in the sense

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that there's not always a connection

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between representatives and their citizens.

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And many times they're unconstrained.

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The, the, the legislators or elites are unconstrained.

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And this is also further shown by Susan Stokes who has,

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some arguments related to presidents.

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And so we're kind of like thinking

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that perhaps in the context of peace agreements,

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the connection would be even worse

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because these are very particular settings.

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These are settings where the, there has been, first of all,

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the, the stakes are very high.

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And so, the evidence already shows

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that when we're talking about security issues,

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the connection tends to be kind of like even weaker.

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And many of the provisions

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that were included in the peace agreement, in the case

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of Columbia, it's even more talk about

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touch upon security issues.

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And so basically these legislators are trying to navigate

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how to put forth these provisions,

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that take into account also what they were, the, the,

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the counterparts, meaning the far in this context would,

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would actually make them be willing to, to,

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to leave the arms and put an end to civil conflict.

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So they're trying to kind of like balance

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and strike a balance between what citizens want,

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but also what are going to be peace agreements

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that are going to end up, creating an agreement

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that ex combat, well,

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that former back then combatants wanna sign.

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And so trying to, in trying to kind

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of like strike this balance, maybe

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Elite will be willing to kind of like compromise

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and be less attentive to what citizens.

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Um, also because, in reality,

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if you look at the survey data, it's really hard

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for legislators to get a good, like an accurate estimate of

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how citizens perceive the different provisions.

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We're trying to look at the different, polling,

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surveys that are out there regarding the peace agreement.

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And very few InCorp incorporate

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specific attitudes towards provisions.

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And so legislators may not even have the data to, to get a,

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a good information or like some good information about

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what citizens think about.

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And so under these circumstances, we would argue

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that it is even harder for us to find a strong linkage

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between what citizens want and what legislators want.

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And so this is kind of like the

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literate that we're drawing on.

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And, and perhaps partisan motivations might be actually

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what guides, what legislators,

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or how legislators are going to form their opinions.

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Trying to get, an accurate estimate of

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how legislators think about this is really complicated

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because many times what we have is roll

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calls and things like that.

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But this is a very specific case

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because we're talking about attitudes

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and also, how they, they think about a peace agreement

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that was being voted on, by piecemeal, right?

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And so one thing that we, we, we were wondering like, okay,

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what's the best way to get at this?

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And basically it's doing a survey.

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Now, doing surveys on legislators is tricky

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because many times, ultimately

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who ends up taking the surveys, you can imagine,

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is their staff, right?

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And so we really wanted to get a sense of

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how do legislators think about these different provisions?

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And we were lucky because, there's an NGO o in Colombia

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that is very well known, the moa, which is the al,

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and they regularly conduct a survey on the universe

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of legislators in Colombia.

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And they basically, the, the numerator go in person

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and make sure that the person who's taking the survey is

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the actual legislator.

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So we partner with the, with this NGO,

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and we embedded some questions and,

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and a survey experiment

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that I'm gonna talk about in a second to be able

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to get a sense of, okay,

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so attitudes from these legislators.

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And that was conducted for on the universe of legislators

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that were elected in 2018 for a four year period.

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And in the survey we did two things. We wanted both.

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So this study is basically to about two things.

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The first one is how do they form their priors

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and do they actually have accurate priors?

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And then to what extent they incorporate citizens'

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preferences in when they're forming their opinions,

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and in particular when they're taking a certain stance

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with regards to a provision

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or a bill that is being voted

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related to the peace agreement.

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So what we did, because we had this kind of a twofold goal,

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what we did was to design an ask tell experimental design.

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So in the,

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So this is an experimental design, as you can imagine.

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We have a randomly selected control group,

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which is basically a group of people,

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of legislators, congress people.

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And we only ask them, what percentage

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of Colombians do you think support, a provision

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that was included in the agreement?

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When I'm talking about the provision,

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it was in particular this provision that sought

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to create 16 special seats in Congress

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to give more political representation to the areas

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of the conflict of the country

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that had been more affected by civil conflict.

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We thought that this was a really nice case

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because in this case, it was ultimately citizens living in

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these areas that would,

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we would actually get benefited from this,

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this increased political representation of this group

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of people who have like systematically been,

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neglected by the state.

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And so going back to this, to experimental design, we wanted

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to get a sense of, okay, what the, the, the personage

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or what is the estimate that legislators think colom of,

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of Colombians who support the creation of this provision

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in general, Colombians in general,

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but we also had some theory for why for,

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while we would think that perhaps their estimates about the

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beneficiaries, the ultimate beneficiaries would be high,

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meaning that they would estimate that support

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among the potential beneficiaries would be higher

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or at least more accurate.

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But then we also wanted to ask this other question,

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which is like, okay, what if we provide

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the actual information?

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And I'm gonna tell you in a second where we,

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because we had actual information.

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And so what we did was for this group, we told legislators

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what was the actual support,

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and then we wanted to see if the people who was,

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who were told about the actual, estimate of Colombians

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and Colombians reciting in conflict affected areas

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after giving them their information,

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they would be more willing to, to,

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to support these provisions.

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One thing that, to, to notice is that we were trying to,

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with this information, we have

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what this design allows us to do two things.

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The first one is to analyze misperceptions, right?

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Uh, or the extent

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to which they misrepresent citizens preferences.

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We had representative data from Colombians in general survey

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data, and we also had representative data of citizens,

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living in conflict affected areas.

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So we would hatch, we actually had data coming from,

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representative samples.

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So we had, this was the estimate that we were using.

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This information was coming from,

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well-respected public opinion service,

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that were conducted by the observatory, gracia

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and of laptop service.

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So we're, we wanted to make sure

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that we were not deceiving anyone

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and we're just giving them accurate information.

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Now, we also asked the control group to give us their,

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their, their, their support for the, for the,

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for the specific, policy.

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So we're able to contrast attitudes among citizens

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and attitudes among,

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or support for this provision among citizens

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and among legisl legislators.

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And the first thing that I wanna men mention is that

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citizens seem to be less polarized about this stance.

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Actually, the, this specific provision has a lot of support,

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like 68%

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of the potential beneficiaries support this provision.

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And about 55% of Colombians in general supported it.

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So like the majority of Colombians, support this

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yet support of course, as you can imagine

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among legislators followed kind of like partisanship.

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And so as I had mentioned at the beginning

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of this interview, there was a play side

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to approve the final agreement,

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and then there were two clear political camps, the one

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that was supported, the peace agreement,

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and the one that was not supporting the peace agreement.

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And basically we do see that there is this kind of like

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by model, support in Congress, meaning people

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or congress, people who were coming from those parties

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that were against the disagreement tend to kind of like be

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of course less supportive of this, of these,

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of this specific provision.

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Whereas the people who were congress, people

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who were coming from the party

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that supported the peace agreement back then in 2016,

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were way more supportive.

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We don't see this among citizens

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because we're able to split support for this provision

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between people who support the peace agreement

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and people who do not support the peace agreement.

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And we don't see that. And in the paper you can

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see actually the figures.

13:06.955 --> 13:08.835
So that was the first thing that we're able to tell.

13:09.135 --> 13:10.915
And then the question is like, okay, so now I'm,

13:10.915 --> 13:12.595
I'm transitioning to kind of like the results,

13:12.895 --> 13:17.835
but, one thing that we're able to see was not only,

13:18.525 --> 13:20.155
these patterns that I'm describing,

13:20.255 --> 13:22.795
but then the question is like, who is more, I mean,

13:22.795 --> 13:24.635
because we have the actual estimate,

13:25.135 --> 13:28.275
and we asked in this as condition the control group,

13:28.735 --> 13:31.315
we asked them to give us their estimate of sup

13:31.315 --> 13:34.155
of citizen support, on the pro of the provision, right?

13:34.615 --> 13:36.835
And so we're able to get a sense of like, to,

13:36.855 --> 13:39.555
to quantify the magnitude of the misperception, right?

13:40.015 --> 13:42.075
The extent to which they underestimate,

13:42.075 --> 13:43.275
or it could be the case that they would

13:43.875 --> 13:46.155
overestimate the estimated support.

13:46.975 --> 13:50.595
And again, one thing that we saw was that the party's stance

13:50.655 --> 13:53.235
or the, whether you belong to a, the coalition

13:53.235 --> 13:56.235
who supported the agreement or not really dictates,

13:56.235 --> 13:59.155
or it's very prognostic of the amount

13:59.175 --> 14:00.995
or of the magnitude of the misperception.

14:02.215 --> 14:03.515
And so this is interesting

14:03.515 --> 14:06.635
because of course, a little bit behind this is kind

14:06.635 --> 14:09.035
of like these notions of parties and motivated reasoning

14:09.175 --> 14:10.195
and, and, and, and,

14:10.255 --> 14:14.155
and if you ex have adopted, a stance against

14:14.215 --> 14:16.515
or support, you may kind of like think

14:16.515 --> 14:18.755
that citizens are more likely to be on your side

14:18.935 --> 14:21.355
and then effectively,

14:21.855 --> 14:24.115
may misrepresent citizens' preferences.

14:24.375 --> 14:25.555
And again, this is a provision

14:25.625 --> 14:29.595
that over time has even become more, more, more,

14:29.865 --> 14:32.955
more supported by citizens, in Colombia.

14:32.975 --> 14:35.235
And of course, as you can imagine among beneficiaries,

14:35.455 --> 14:37.635
one thing to note of course, is that when we,

14:37.635 --> 14:39.835
because we asked about Colombian's opinions

14:39.835 --> 14:43.435
and also Ians living in the most affected, areas

14:43.825 --> 14:44.955
because of conflict.

14:45.855 --> 14:49.555
So the magnitude of the misrepresentation does get reduced

14:49.665 --> 14:53.405
when we are asking, among like legislators

14:53.425 --> 14:55.365
to get their estimates among this group

14:55.385 --> 14:56.885
of potential beneficiaries.

14:57.305 --> 15:00.485
And yet we do see that, there are these biases in,

15:00.485 --> 15:02.645
in quantifying the, the misrepresentation.

15:03.155 --> 15:05.005
Then a couple of other things that we asked,

15:05.025 --> 15:06.885
but then, which was like, okay, maybe this is not,

15:06.885 --> 15:09.245
this is only like, kind of like the partisan story,

15:09.745 --> 15:11.445
but what about the electoral incentives?

15:12.105 --> 15:15.845
So there are 16 seats that were going to be created,

15:16.385 --> 15:18.125
and they would be representing different

15:18.845 --> 15:20.205
geographical areas of the country.

15:20.945 --> 15:22.565
And so there were some legislators

15:22.565 --> 15:25.445
that were coming from those, areas of the country.

15:26.275 --> 15:29.165
Important to notice is that basically these provi,

15:29.165 --> 15:32.245
these these seats, be parties

15:32.275 --> 15:35.005
with existing representation in Congress would not be

15:35.005 --> 15:36.845
allowed to run candidates, right?

15:37.185 --> 15:39.005
So this was literally trying, like,

15:39.005 --> 15:40.565
this provision was literally trying

15:40.565 --> 15:43.365
to give more representation to the areas of the country

15:43.785 --> 15:46.685
and to the broad base, you know, like from the bottom up,

15:46.685 --> 15:48.005
basically kind of like thinking

15:48.005 --> 15:49.725
about movements, indigenous groups.

15:50.145 --> 15:51.525
And so going back to this,

15:51.525 --> 15:52.525
however, we thought

15:52.525 --> 15:55.765
that perhaps legislators coming from those areas

15:55.825 --> 15:58.685
of the country where there would be like these new,

15:59.305 --> 16:00.645
states they had,

16:00.645 --> 16:02.605
they would have more information, et cetera.

16:02.605 --> 16:04.205
So we also thought that,

16:04.215 --> 16:07.045
these legislators would have more accurate estimates.

16:07.185 --> 16:09.405
And it is true. So, if we look at,

16:09.405 --> 16:12.405
and we, we restrict the sample for those legislators

16:12.435 --> 16:14.685
that have these, that are coming from these areas

16:14.685 --> 16:16.365
that would potentially get access

16:16.385 --> 16:19.565
to these increased representation, they tend to be,

16:19.755 --> 16:23.685
more, have to have more accurate, perceptions.

16:24.115 --> 16:26.165
Then let's move to the second research question,

16:26.165 --> 16:28.565
which is like, okay, now we have been able to kind

16:28.565 --> 16:30.285
of like characterize all of these patterns.

16:30.955 --> 16:33.445
What happens when we give information to these leaders?

16:33.545 --> 16:35.285
And this is important because ultimately

16:36.005 --> 16:37.365
citizens are the people who kind

16:37.365 --> 16:39.285
of like get ultimately benefited from us

16:39.285 --> 16:41.565
of a peace agreement, especially people

16:41.565 --> 16:44.245
who are living in a conflict affected area, right?

16:44.925 --> 16:47.245
Violence gets, gets reduced

16:47.385 --> 16:48.965
and people will have different living

16:48.965 --> 16:50.045
conditions in this area.

16:51.085 --> 16:53.585
And so we do not find results.

16:54.055 --> 16:55.265
Granted, we are limited

16:55.265 --> 16:59.105
because of course we have a limited universe of subjects,

16:59.105 --> 17:00.465
of participants of our study,

17:00.465 --> 17:03.505
which is basically the universe of Congress people.

17:04.245 --> 17:06.425
Um, so one may argue that

17:06.425 --> 17:07.945
because it's an experimental design,

17:07.965 --> 17:11.225
of course we may be underpowered, we recognize in the paper

17:11.245 --> 17:13.705
and the, and in the article actually we provide a, like a,

17:14.105 --> 17:16.225
a more detailed discussion around the issues of power,

17:16.535 --> 17:17.545
statistical power,

17:18.845 --> 17:20.385
but we do not find

17:20.495 --> 17:24.505
that informing legislators about citizens support, not only

17:25.185 --> 17:28.985
citizens in general, but actually informing them about the

17:28.985 --> 17:31.625
percentage of people living in the conflict affected areas

17:31.625 --> 17:34.345
that eventually would get benefited from this policy.

17:34.815 --> 17:37.905
Neither of these two pieces of information seems to shape,

17:38.165 --> 17:41.385
support for this stance among regulators.

17:42.205 --> 17:45.905
And so let me just use this to kind of like transition,

17:46.245 --> 17:48.755
to, so what, right? What do

17:48.755 --> 17:49.755
We learn? Um,

17:49.755 --> 17:50.885
and this is important

17:50.885 --> 17:53.845
because as I had mentioned at the beginning of the,

17:53.845 --> 17:56.045
of this interview, we had found

17:56.045 --> 17:59.685
that citizens many times use, cues from elites,

17:59.685 --> 18:01.005
many times legislators

18:01.025 --> 18:03.605
to inform their stance on the peace agreement.

18:04.185 --> 18:06.045
And so on the one hand, citizens matter,

18:06.045 --> 18:07.925
because in this case, in the case,

18:08.435 --> 18:10.325
they thoroughly approved or not.

18:10.325 --> 18:12.165
They, they, they were called to approve

18:12.185 --> 18:13.245
or not the peace agreement.

18:13.355 --> 18:15.045
This is kind of like direct,

18:15.145 --> 18:17.285
direct way in which they participated.

18:17.305 --> 18:18.565
But then afterwards,

18:18.635 --> 18:21.645
because legislators have a big saying like the, the,

18:21.645 --> 18:23.605
the provision that get passed through congress

18:23.865 --> 18:26.525
or also a president who's either willing

18:26.545 --> 18:28.045
or not, to implement

18:28.545 --> 18:30.605
or put more efforts into the implementation

18:30.605 --> 18:33.045
of a peace agreement, citizens do vote

18:33.065 --> 18:34.685
for these types of politicians.

18:34.865 --> 18:36.885
And so it is important to understand that

18:37.275 --> 18:40.285
however, the evidence that we have in this paper kind

18:40.285 --> 18:44.085
of like points to a more limited role that they play

18:44.355 --> 18:47.565
because c legislators don't seem to be following

18:48.525 --> 18:50.725
citizens' support or the information coming from

18:51.005 --> 18:52.045
citizens when they're informing.

18:52.185 --> 18:54.165
And ultimately legislators matter a lot

18:54.165 --> 18:56.485
because they're the ones who are going to approve

18:56.545 --> 18:58.925
or not, a law that is going

18:58.925 --> 19:00.445
to implement the peace agreement.

19:00.865 --> 19:03.845
And so do this, this, this research just pointed kind

19:03.845 --> 19:05.285
of like some of the limits,

19:05.865 --> 19:08.125
in which citizens can influence,

19:08.315 --> 19:11.885
political elites role in stabilizing peace agreements,

19:12.215 --> 19:14.365
which is the, the, the ultimate question

19:14.365 --> 19:15.645
that guides our agenda.

19:15.745 --> 19:18.805
And when I say our agenda is with my colleagues Aila and,

19:18.825 --> 19:21.365
and Miguel, which is how can we secure peace agreements

19:21.905 --> 19:23.605
and we're gonna focus on the role

19:23.605 --> 19:25.325
that these different actors play.

19:25.825 --> 19:26.925
And, and, and,

19:26.985 --> 19:28.605
and this is not a unique case,

19:28.925 --> 19:30.445
I have been talking about Colombia,

19:30.585 --> 19:33.605
but there are other examples where legislators

19:33.625 --> 19:36.885
and in general policy elites play a really important role in

19:36.885 --> 19:38.365
the implementation of that peace agreement.

19:38.835 --> 19:40.765
When things are not implemented

19:40.765 --> 19:43.445
as agreed upon on a peace agreement, you know,

19:44.205 --> 19:46.805
conflict recurrence is, a big, risk.

19:46.945 --> 19:49.605
And we have seen that in other, in other instances, like

19:49.605 --> 19:52.645
for instance in Chad, whenever this, the, the things

19:52.645 --> 19:55.045
that have been agreed upon, are not followed

19:55.045 --> 19:58.325
through those instances are con conductive

19:59.025 --> 20:00.565
of co conflict recurrence.

20:00.585 --> 20:01.645
And so we're trying to kind

20:01.645 --> 20:03.245
of like understand the different actors

20:03.865 --> 20:06.365
in these different contexts that are yeah,

20:06.435 --> 20:07.725
very specific in particular.

Colombia's 2016 Peace Agreement and Its Implications

00:00:00 - The context of this article is the 2016 peace agreement that was signed between the Colombian government and park, which was, aula group that was active since the 1960s in Colombia. So it was, a civil conflict that took place for more than 50 years. And that finally in 2016, after four years of negotiations was, ended. And, and this is kind of like the context, of course, this is not the first time that there's a peace agreement, but this gave us an opportunity for us to kind of like,
00:00:34 - and also elites preferences towards peace agreements. The negotiations took place for four years, and basically, back then, president Juan Santos decided that the final agreement was going to be approved through a play site. the play site, the agreement was narrowly rejected by a very, very small margin. And after that, the peace agreement ended up being approved, through Congress. And so this is important, this is important information
00:01:07 - of citizens, but also legislators throughout this process, not only at the, in the approval of the peace agreement, but also in the implementation, because the peace agreement ultimately that was approved, ended up being, basically approved piecemeal through Congress because each one of the, the, the provisions that had been included in the peace agreement had to be approved in Congress by legislators. So, so because of this specific context, we really wanted
00:01:37 - and these agreements, as you might imagine, are complex documents. So you having a, a clear stance requires you to kind of like navigate thousands, not thousands, but hundreds of pages and under and, and come up with a clear stance. And so I think that part of the motivation be, be behind this, this, this piece that, by the way I have to mention is joint work with I from uc, Berkeley, and, and Miguel Garcia from the University of Los Angeles. we have this agenda on trying precisely to understand,
00:02:07 - and legislators, formed their attitudes towards this complex provisions that are usually included in agreements. And this, and Colombia was, an amazing opportunity because of the characteristics of the peace agreement to study these questions. So in this specific article that I'm talking about, we are interested, we're shifting focus from citizens. We have prior, papers working on specifically the, the role or how citizens form their attitudes in this case. And we have shown actually that citizens, because these are so complex, the provisions
00:02:40 - through the information is really complicated. And many times citizens are at capacity, so it's really hard for them to take the time to just kind of like read and get fully informed. And so part of the, of the literature, the existing literature basically shows that citizens do use elite cues to form their opinions. And so precisely with my colleagues, Aila and, and Miguel, we have found that, and we have documented this in, some other published articles. And the idea for us was to kind of like, okay,

Elites and Citizens: An Unequal Representation

00:03:12 - One question is, how do these elites, policy elites formed their attitudes? And so with regards to the, to a literature, there's a longstanding, literature studying the, the, the role of representation. What's the linkage between the elites and citizens under certain circumstances? There, the, the has shown that this link is stronger or weaker, preliminary evidence,
00:03:43 - evidence showing that in the case of the United States, for instance, poor voters tend to be less represented. and then trying to expand this beyond the US case loop one Warner, for instance, showed that this is also present, across different countries in the world. So basically they collected sur surveys on ma the mass public and also elites, and showed that this pattern was still present in, in, outside the us in the case of Latin America, which is the region that, were investigated
00:04:16 - So there, for instance, since back, to the studies done by O'Donnell who basically determined that he was saying basically that the, the, the way in which democracy works in Latin America, it's the, the negative in the sense that there's not always a connection between representatives and their citizens. And many times they're unconstrained. The, the, the legislators or elites are unconstrained.
00:04:48 - some arguments related to presidents. And so we're kind of like thinking that perhaps in the context of peace agreements, the connection would be even worse because these are very particular settings. These are settings where the, there has been, first of all, the, the stakes are very high. And so, the evidence already shows that when we're talking about security issues, the connection tends to be kind of like even weaker. And many of the provisions that were included in the peace agreement, in the case of Columbia, it's even more talk about
00:05:18 - And so basically these legislators are trying to navigate how to put forth these provisions, that take into account also what they were, the, the, the counterparts, meaning the far in this context would, would actually make them be willing to, to, to leave the arms and put an end to civil conflict. So they're trying to kind of like balance and strike a balance between what citizens want, but also what are going to be peace agreements that are going to end up, creating an agreement
00:05:50 - that former back then combatants wanna sign. And so trying to, in trying to kind of like strike this balance, maybe Elite will be willing to kind of like compromise and be less attentive to what citizens. also because, in reality, if you look at the survey data, it's really hard for legislators to get a good, like an accurate estimate of how citizens perceive the different provisions. We're trying to look at the different, polling, surveys that are out there regarding the peace agreement.

Legislators' Attitudes Toward Citizen Preferences

00:06:22 - specific attitudes towards provisions. And so legislators may not even have the data to, to get a, a good information or like some good information about what citizens think about. And so under these circumstances, we would argue that it is even harder for us to find a strong linkage between what citizens want and what legislators want. And so this is kind of like the literate that we're drawing on. And, and perhaps partisan motivations might be actually what guides, what legislators,
00:06:53 - Trying to get, an accurate estimate of how legislators think about this is really complicated because many times what we have is roll calls and things like that. But this is a very specific case because we're talking about attitudes and also, how they, they think about a peace agreement that was being voted on, by piecemeal, right? And so one thing that we, we, we were wondering like, okay, what's the best way to get at this?
00:07:23 - Now, doing surveys on legislators is tricky because many times, ultimately who ends up taking the surveys, you can imagine, is their staff, right? And so we really wanted to get a sense of how do legislators think about these different provisions? And we were lucky because, there's an NGO o in Colombia that is very well known, the moa, which is the al, and they regularly conduct a survey on the universe of legislators in Colombia.
00:07:54 - and make sure that the person who's taking the survey is the actual legislator. So we partner with the, with this NGO, and we embedded some questions and, and a survey experiment that I'm gonna talk about in a second to be able to get a sense of, okay, so attitudes from these legislators. And that was conducted for on the universe of legislators that were elected in 2018 for a four year period. And in the survey we did two things. We wanted both.
00:08:25 - The first one is how do they form their priors and do they actually have accurate priors? And then to what extent they incorporate citizens' preferences in when they're forming their opinions, and in particular when they're taking a certain stance with regards to a provision or a bill that is being voted related to the peace agreement. So what we did, because we had this kind of a twofold goal, what we did was to design an ask tell experimental design.
00:08:54 - So this is an experimental design, as you can imagine. We have a randomly selected control group, which is basically a group of people, of legislators, congress people. And we only ask them, what percentage of Colombians do you think support, a provision that was included in the agreement? When I'm talking about the provision, it was in particular this provision that sought to create 16 special seats in Congress to give more political representation to the areas of the conflict of the country

Understanding Political Support for Peace Provisions

00:09:26 - We thought that this was a really nice case because in this case, it was ultimately citizens living in these areas that would, we would actually get benefited from this, this increased political representation of this group of people who have like systematically been, neglected by the state. And so going back to this, to experimental design, we wanted to get a sense of, okay, what the, the, the personage or what is the estimate that legislators think colom of, of Colombians who support the creation of this provision
00:09:56 - but we also had some theory for why for, while we would think that perhaps their estimates about the beneficiaries, the ultimate beneficiaries would be high, meaning that they would estimate that support among the potential beneficiaries would be higher or at least more accurate. But then we also wanted to ask this other question, which is like, okay, what if we provide the actual information? And I'm gonna tell you in a second where we, because we had actual information. And so what we did was for this group, we told legislators what was the actual support,
00:10:31 - who were told about the actual, estimate of Colombians and Colombians reciting in conflict affected areas after giving them their information, they would be more willing to, to, to support these provisions. One thing that, to, to notice is that we were trying to, with this information, we have what this design allows us to do two things. The first one is to analyze misperceptions, right? or the extent to which they misrepresent citizens preferences.
00:11:02 - data, and we also had representative data of citizens, living in conflict affected areas. So we would hatch, we actually had data coming from, representative samples. So we had, this was the estimate that we were using. This information was coming from, well-respected public opinion service, that were conducted by the observatory, gracia and of laptop service. So we're, we wanted to make sure that we were not deceiving anyone and we're just giving them accurate information.
00:11:34 - their, their, their support for the, for the, for the specific, policy. So we're able to contrast attitudes among citizens and attitudes among, or support for this provision among citizens and among legisl legislators. And the first thing that I wanna men mention is that citizens seem to be less polarized about this stance. Actually, the, this specific provision has a lot of support, like 68% of the potential beneficiaries support this provision.
00:12:05 - So like the majority of Colombians, support this yet support of course, as you can imagine among legislators followed kind of like partisanship. And so as I had mentioned at the beginning of this interview, there was a play side to approve the final agreement, and then there were two clear political camps, the one that was supported, the peace agreement, and the one that was not supporting the peace agreement. And basically we do see that there is this kind of like by model, support in Congress, meaning people

Partisan Support and Misrepresentation in Peace Agreements

00:12:38 - that were against the disagreement tend to kind of like be of course less supportive of this, of these, of this specific provision. Whereas the people who were congress, people who were coming from the party that supported the peace agreement back then in 2016, were way more supportive. We don't see this among citizens because we're able to split support for this provision between people who support the peace agreement and people who do not support the peace agreement. And we don't see that. And in the paper you can see actually the figures.
00:13:09 - And then the question is like, okay, so now I'm, I'm transitioning to kind of like the results, but, one thing that we're able to see was not only, these patterns that I'm describing, but then the question is like, who is more, I mean, because we have the actual estimate, and we asked in this as condition the control group, we asked them to give us their estimate of sup of citizen support, on the pro of the provision, right? And so we're able to get a sense of like, to, to quantify the magnitude of the misperception, right?
00:13:42 - or it could be the case that they would overestimate the estimated support. And again, one thing that we saw was that the party's stance or the, whether you belong to a, the coalition who supported the agreement or not really dictates, or it's very prognostic of the amount or of the magnitude of the misperception. And so this is interesting because of course, a little bit behind this is kind of like these notions of parties and motivated reasoning and, and, and, and,
00:14:14 - or support, you may kind of like think that citizens are more likely to be on your side and then effectively, may misrepresent citizens' preferences. And again, this is a provision that over time has even become more, more, more, more supported by citizens, in Colombia. And of course, as you can imagine among beneficiaries, one thing to note of course, is that when we, because we asked about Colombian's opinions and also Ians living in the most affected, areas
00:14:45 - So the magnitude of the misrepresentation does get reduced when we are asking, among like legislators to get their estimates among this group of potential beneficiaries. And yet we do see that, there are these biases in, in quantifying the, the misrepresentation. Then a couple of other things that we asked, but then, which was like, okay, maybe this is not, this is only like, kind of like the partisan story, but what about the electoral incentives? So there are 16 seats that were going to be created,
00:15:18 - geographical areas of the country. And so there were some legislators that were coming from those, areas of the country. Important to notice is that basically these provi, these these seats, be parties with existing representation in Congress would not be allowed to run candidates, right? So this was literally trying, like, this provision was literally trying to give more representation to the areas of the country and to the broad base, you know, like from the bottom up,

Legislators' Influence on Peace Agreement Support

00:15:48 - about movements, indigenous groups. And so going back to this, however, we thought that perhaps legislators coming from those areas of the country where there would be like these new, states they had, they would have more information, et cetera. So we also thought that, these legislators would have more accurate estimates. And it is true. So, if we look at, and we, we restrict the sample for those legislators that have these, that are coming from these areas that would potentially get access to these increased representation, they tend to be,
00:16:24 - Then let's move to the second research question, which is like, okay, now we have been able to kind of like characterize all of these patterns. What happens when we give information to these leaders? And this is important because ultimately citizens are the people who kind of like get ultimately benefited from us of a peace agreement, especially people who are living in a conflict affected area, right? Violence gets, gets reduced and people will have different living conditions in this area.
00:16:54 - Granted, we are limited because of course we have a limited universe of subjects, of participants of our study, which is basically the universe of Congress people. so one may argue that because it's an experimental design, of course we may be underpowered, we recognize in the paper and the, and in the article actually we provide a, like a, a more detailed discussion around the issues of power, statistical power, but we do not find that informing legislators about citizens support, not only
00:17:28 - percentage of people living in the conflict affected areas that eventually would get benefited from this policy. Neither of these two pieces of information seems to shape, support for this stance among regulators. And so let me just use this to kind of like transition, to, so what, right? What do We learn? and this is important because as I had mentioned at the beginning of the, of this interview, we had found
00:17:59 - many times legislators to inform their stance on the peace agreement. And so on the one hand, citizens matter, because in this case, in the case, they thoroughly approved or not. They, they, they were called to approve or not the peace agreement. This is kind of like direct, direct way in which they participated. But then afterwards, because legislators have a big saying like the, the, the provision that get passed through congress or also a president who's either willing
00:18:28 - or put more efforts into the implementation of a peace agreement, citizens do vote for these types of politicians. And so it is important to understand that however, the evidence that we have in this paper kind of like points to a more limited role that they play because c legislators don't seem to be following citizens' support or the information coming from citizens when they're informing. And ultimately legislators matter a lot because they're the ones who are going to approve

Challenges in Securing Peace Agreements

00:18:58 - to implement the peace agreement. And so do this, this, this research just pointed kind of like some of the limits, in which citizens can influence, political elites role in stabilizing peace agreements, which is the, the, the ultimate question that guides our agenda. And when I say our agenda is with my colleagues Aila and, and Miguel, which is how can we secure peace agreements and we're gonna focus on the role that these different actors play. And, and, and,
00:19:28 - I have been talking about Colombia, but there are other examples where legislators and in general policy elites play a really important role in the implementation of that peace agreement. When things are not implemented as agreed upon on a peace agreement, you know, conflict recurrence is, a big, risk. And we have seen that in other, in other instances, like for instance in Chad, whenever this, the, the things that have been agreed upon, are not followed through those instances are con conductive
00:20:06 - And so we're trying to kind of like understand the different actors in these different contexts that are yeah, very specific in particular.

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