Replication Data for: When the state becomes complicit: mayors, criminal actors, and the deliberate weakening of the local state in Colombia

Some politicians engage in relationships with criminal actors in pursuit of mutual interests. How does their rise to power affect the state's extractive capacity? I focus on one of Colombia’s worst episodes of criminal politics to understand how the victory of paramilitary-friendly mayors impacted subnational taxation. Focusing on close races, I find that the victory of a paramilitary-friendly mayor in 2007 led to a substantive drop in property taxation in subsequent years. I propose that criminal collusion allows politicians and violent actors to accumulate wealth and political power, but doing so requires them to deliberately undermine local state institutions. Indeed the evidence suggests that municipalities governed by paramilitary-friendly politicians experienced a weakening of property rights institutions—cadastral appraisals and land formalization—and the worsening of local judicial institutions. Rather than a mere consequence of criminal collusion, state weakening is a politically strategic decision that serves the interests of both criminals and politicians.