The Making of Democrats: Elections and Party Development in Postwar Bosnia, El Salvador, and Mozambique

Can elections create democrats? Why and how do former armed opposition groups decide to invest in electoral politics or to undermine them? This book argues that the answer lies in the patterns of inter- and intraparty struggles created by participation in repeated elections over time. Democratization has become the cornerstone of post-civil war state reconstruction, but the role of political parties in the success or failure of democratic state building is understudied. The book examines four parties in three countries over ten years or more of electoral politics: Renamo in Mozambique, the Croatian Democratic Union and the Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia, and the FMLN in El Salvador.

Carrie Manning is Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University.