Inequality and Governance in Unstable Democracies: Telephone Survey with Ex-combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 2021 - 2022

The collection consists of a phone survey conducted in December 2021 and January 2022 with ex-combatants from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), in collaboration between the authors, the Agencia para la Reincorporación y la Normalización (ARN) - the government agency responsible for reincorporation of FARC ex-combatants - and the CNR-FARC (now CNR-Comunes) - the joint government/FARC mechanism for reincorporation and related topics as established by the peace agreement.

The respondents consisted of 11,374 FARC ex-combatants who, as of November 2021, were engaged in the reincorporation processes in Colombia and had contact information available in the ARN's database. Effective contact was established with 4,435 former FARC-EP combatants. All respondents were 18 years of age or older. Prior to administering each survey, the enumerator obtained informed consent.<p>The project is organised around three thematic areas: (i) how trust within and between social groups and towards governance institutions emerges and evolves in contexts of rising inequality; (ii) how trust in unequal societies shapes governance outcomes through two intervening factors - political behaviour and social mobilisation; and (iii) the pathways through which changes in such intervening factors may sometimes result in inclusive governance outcomes, but in the breakdown of governance at other times. Each of these areas will incorporate detailed theoretical and empirical analyses at the subnational level in four countries - Colombia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Spain - affected by rising inequalities and characterised by unstable or strained democratic institutions.

The absence of systematic qualitative, quantitative and behavioural data has hindered progress in understanding the links between inequality, trust and governance in countries outside North America and Western Europe. The project seeks to compile a number of unexplored data sources and collect new data comparatively across these other countries in order to fulfil this critical gap. This data collection will involve: (i) comparative individual-level surveys to understand contemporaneous levels of trust, and attitudes towards formal and non-formal local governing institutions, (ii) behavioural experiments under different inequality and political contexts to better understand the formation of trust under different scenarios, (iii) indepth interviews with key political actors in government, members of social movements and citizen organisations to understand how inequalities affect perceptions of governance and strategies of political mobilisation, and (iv) detailed compilation of archival data that will allow us to better understand how inequalities and attitudes have evolved across time and how different historical junctures may shape the governance outcomes we observe today.</p>