Peace settlements ending civil wars often pursue political solutions that require violent actors to form political parties and engage with politics peacefully. Some settlements include provisions such as reservations, quotas or other types of political affirmative action to safeguard electoral transitions. What are the consequences of these institutional safeguards on rebel parties' grassroots? Scholarship on political affirmative action generally concludes that reservations benefit targeted groups. However, I posit that these safeguards may hinder the consolidation of rebel parties by generating counterproductive incentives that demobilize the party base. I study the case of the former FARC-EP party Comunes, who were granted 10 legislative seats in the 2016 peace agreement. I implement a priming experiment with this crucial but difficult to reach population to assess the consequences of this provision. On average, primed participants reported less interest in a range of party-building activities. Heterogeneity suggests these safeguards may come at the cost of civilian grassroots specifically, further concentrating rebel party activism among ex-combatants.

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The viability of rebel parties as long term political contenders depends in part, on acceptance of them as legitimate political actors. Yet existing work suggests that civilians often punish perpetrators of past violence at the ballot box and that conflict generates long-term antipathies. This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to clarify when and why civilians are more likely to penalize rebel parties. First we conduct a series of semi-structured interviews with Comunes party leaders and members. These uniformly claim that civilian stigmatization of the party is pervasive. Second, we design an endorsement experiment to measure the extent of aversion toward the party and whether it is distinct from assessments based on ideology or platform. Findings show that civilians penalize policies endorsed by Comunes and their endorsement elicits aversion even when compared to the endorsement of other ideologically similar parties.

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The long-term political engagement of rebel parties is fundamental to whether electoral transitions succeed in transforming conflict. In this paper, I offer a new conceptualization of rebel parties’ trajectories, clarify unexamined cross-party variation, and assess the role of electoral success. Scholars have focused on investigating the initial transition of rebel groups into parties, their re-militarization and their electoral popularity. Although these are important outcomes, they mischaracterize the strength of rebel parties’ political engagement. I introduce the concept of party perseverance, which I define as the recurrence of rebel parties’ participation in elections since disarmament. After rebel groups’ initial decision to become a party, their actual engagement in electoral competition is constantly tested. To analyze perseverance, I collect data on all elections with rebel parties from 1947 - 2021, covering 117 parties across 667 elections. First, the data show that while the political integration of groups with violent origins is possible, early commitment does not ensure future participation. While nearly 50\% of all rebel parties participate in almost all possible elections, some exist only nominally, and still others cease to exist or return to war. In particular, 10\% of parties participate once and never again. Second, descriptive findings suggest that rebel party electoral success does not strictly determine perseverance, despite often being theorized as one in the same. To illustrate, 45\% of low support parties participate in at least 8 out of 10 of elections and 38\% of low support parties participate in all elections.

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