Vol. 22 No. 46 (2020): Dossier: Local elections in Colombia (september to december)

Presentation

The 46^th edition is the last of the year 2020 for the journal Reflexión Política. This new special edition is dedicated to analyzing local governments and elections in Colombia based on case studies from different perspectives, in what represents an important contribution to political science in Colombia and to the analysis of regional or sub-national politics.

            This edition starts out with an article by Professor Javier Duque Daza that reviews the alliances and coalitions in elections to governors in Colombia in 2011, 2015 and 2019. Following a review of the types of candidatures to governor in each period and determining whether the candidature was the product of a legally established alliance or coalition, he performs an analysis of the political networks established for each candidature, in order to identify the institutional factors, the party systems and political parties that propitiated the creation of alliances or coalitions. 

Duque found that the larger parties are the ones that tend to create more coalitions, whereas smaller parties only tend to enter into alliances or coalitions in very competitive contexts. He also found that the alliances are not grounded on the ideological or programmatic interests of each party, but rather are related to the interests in dispute in each department. The most ideological parties, such as those on the far left of the political spectrum, tend to have a low probability of forming alliances and coalitions. To conclude, the author proposes a series of questions regarding the operation of democracy, accountability, and representation, because the existence of winning pragmatic coalitions is the result of the capacity to aggregate interests and votes from a political clientele, which makes it difficult to better identify them in terms of departmental representation, political control, and accountability of governors.

The second article addresses the split vote in the elections in the most important cities of Colombia. Inés Idrobo Bedoya analyzes the elections of 2011, 2015 and 2019 in Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and Barranquilla. In electoral behavior studies, the split vote is defined as a voter voting for two different parties in the same election. Based on the election results, the author calculates a split vote index in the elections to mayor and councilmen in each city in the three time periods included in the study. One of her main findings is the high level of split votes in every one of the cases studied, and that the split votes are particularly frequent in Bogotá and Cali, which reflects the decline of the traditional parties in these two cities, the high fragmentation of the party system and the low level of turnout in the elections. Lastly, the author proposes as future research agenda the need to identify the factors that influence split voting in sub-national elections in Colombia. 

            Finally, the article by Luis González Tule is devoted to analyzing the phenomenon of vote buying in the department of Atlántico. Based on the collection of primary information and interviews in the city of Barranquilla, the author describes the operation of a political network established to promote buying of votes in the city for a specific candidate. He defines two levels of coordination: a financial-administrative area in charge of managing the network’s finances, information, and resources; and a political-operating area in charge of election and campaign strategy. 

The main contribution of this article is a detailed reconstruction of the way a vote buying network operates in Colombia, where in this case in particular the candidate is more than a mere intermediary who channeled votes to favor the interests of a businessman. The article closes with a dissertation on the phenomenon of vote buying and its implications for democracy, particularly on representation and the capture of State resources by political clans whose members are at the same time businessmen.

Lastly, this edition features two articles on topics related to public policies and human rights. The first article by Gino Montenegro and Álvaro Franco identifies the values and rules that guide the Protection Network to Reduce Extreme Poverty, more widely known as Red Unidos, which has been implemented since 2007 in Colombia, based on a review of documentation and interviews. The reduction of poverty, the efficient use of resources and a competitive society are the main pillars of the network. The second article by Diego Botero provides a detailed reconstruction of the process of adoption of egalitarian marriage in 2010 in Mexico City. The most prominent features of the process were the social mobilization, the legislative debate for its approval, and the jurisprudence produced on this matter in Mexico City and the attempts to obtain its approval in the legislature. 

            On behalf of the journal’s publishers, we thank the authors who accepted our invitation to participate in this edition, as well as the peer reviewers of the articles we selected for this edition. Clearly, without their participation, the Journal’s objectives would not be fulfilled. 

Nadia Pérez Guevara

Editor