Violent Victors by Sarah Zukerman Daly;

Author:Sarah Zukerman Daly;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

7

Rebel Victory in Nicaragua

THIS CHAPTER TRACES political life after the Nicaraguan civil war between the Somoza regime and the Sandinista rebels (1961–1979). The book argues that military war outcomes influence the strategies by which the parties of former combatants seek votes from war-ravaged populations; these strategies, in turn, guide whether victimized populations elect the successor parties to govern. Chapter 5 on El Salvador studied these dynamics in the case of a military draw, the Guatemala Chapter 6 in the case of government victory. This chapter examines the case where the rebels were victorious. The goals of this case study in the book, however, are circumscribed, due to important caveats to the case—it skirts the book’s scope conditions—and data limitations—it lacks contemporaneous polling data. In general, the book models rebel victory as symmetrical to government victory. The preceding chapter tested the book’s party-level hypotheses in the case of a military victory, so I do not seek to repeat those tests here. However, in the Guatemalan case, two factors covaried with war outcomes: government belligerent status and right-wing partisanship. This chapter uses evidence from Nicaragua to disentangle these variables, to verify that the dynamics of a rebel win largely mirror those of a government win, and to establish that neither the nature of the warring side as government or rebel, nor its partisan identity as right or left, can account better for belligerent parties’ strategies and victimized populations’ political behavior.

The book’s theory anticipates that war outcomes will have far more impact than these other determinants of party strategy. In particular, it expects left-wing rebel victors to be likely to behave similarly to right-wing government victors: to run as Restrained Leviathans. Conversely, the framework expects that right-wing government belligerents, if defeated militarily, will be likely to behave similarly to vanquished parties of a left-wing, rebel flavor: they will adopt a strategy of Tactical Immoderation. This shadow case evaluates these observable implications in the aftermath of the victory of the socialist Sandinista rebels, and the defeat of the conservative governing Somozas in 1979.

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