Civil War and Political Participation: Evidence from Uganda

The study aims at the understanding of the institutional legacies of civil war by analyzing the impact of the armed conflict afflicting Uganda in 1996?2007 on civic and political participation, measured by the frequency of political discussion, meeting attendance, and electoral turnout. The study, relying on a survey sequence that started before the spiral of violence fully unraveled, performs difference-in-differences estimation. Also, exploiting the geographic variation as well as the timing of the surveys, it provides suggestive evidence as regards the time path of the impact. The study fails to detect any positive effect of violence on formal electoral participation in the elections held during the civil war, which stands in contrast to previous studies that compared individual-level outcomes within affected districts, and find that individuals who directly experienced violence were voting more than less affected individuals. Instead of fostering active involvement in the political life of the country, the study finds that the exposure to violence in northern Uganda seems to have affected the confidence in the functioning of the country's democratic institutions.