Narrative on Local Democracies, Government, and Public Policy in the Colombian Pacific

This chapter offers a historical reconstruction of the process that the political regime of the Colombian Pacific has undergone during the period in which the National Front was dismantled (1975–1991) and the period after the 1991 National Constituent Assembly. Based on the narrative offered here, a certain behavioral logic of the subnational political regime of the Colombian Pacific is identified in the two periods indicated, in such a way that an approach is proposed from an understanding of networks and the instrumental rationality of political organizations. We say that the mechanisms of clientelistic intermediation have an effect on how political organizations and their behavior rationality are configured, whether they are political parties, political fractions, or political factions. More precisely, what we want to establish here is that it is the mechanism of clientelistic intermediation that defines the nature, scope, and limitations of the instrumental rationality with which each political organization operates, whatever it may be. Each mechanism of clientelistic intermediation is defined by the topology of a clientelistic network, in the sense of network theory, and by the clientelistic game that operates in it, a game in the sense of game theory. The central argument offered here suggests that each type of clientelism is defined by one and only one mechanism of clientelistic intermediation, since it is not every type of clientelism exchanging the same resources, nor that given a certain type of clientelism, all the members of the same clientelistic network exchange the same type of resources.