4 on the importance of gaining popular support in conflict outcomes. According to practitioners, and scholars such as Kalyvas (2006) and Fearon (2008), the key strategic advantage from gaining the support of non-combatants is the provision of information about the armed forces of the opposition. Problems of within-group credible commitment (such as whether citizens can rely on leaders to pursue their interests in the event that they prevail in the conflict) are not the central focus of these analyses. Nagl (2002) places great weight on the importance for counterinsurgency strategy of gaining the trust of local actors. He focuses most on how trust matters and less on how it emerges. One way it can emerge, however, as is implicit in Kaplan‟s (2010) analysis, is if local actors are able to act collectively, allowing them to impose a larger sanction on leaders who renege on their commitments.

The literature portrays the battle for hearts and minds in two ways; collective action by citizens is relevant to both. One is the struggle by competing groups to make credible commitments to civilian populations to reward them for cooperation. Another is their struggle to deliver the benefits of good government to these populations, such as public security, social services, or predictable and non-predatory taxation. Collective action by civilian populations plays a central role in both cases: collectively organized civilians can more easily punish groups that renege on their commitments or who fail to provide the benefits of good government.

The most-studied institutional arrangement through which citizens can hold leaders accountable is voting. In fact, the absence of competitive elections is a notable feature of conflict countries. Systematic data supports this claim in the case of governments; casual observation offers little indication that insurgent-controlled territories are any different. The Sambanis (2004) conflict database records 71 conflicts from 1975 – 2000 for which data on competitive elections (from the Database of Political Institutions) are available. In only 15 of these cases were countries governed by competitively elected leaders in the year before the conflict started. In the remainder, governments were not competitively elected or not elected at all. Indeed, this empirical regularity is as striking as the association of conflict with income: of these same 71 conflicts, again only 15 (not the same 15) occurred in the richest 50 percent of countries.

Although the paucity of elections in conflict countries is an indication that leaders in conflict countries impose limits on collective action by citizens, elections are not a sufficient condition for effective collective action. Even citizens with unfettered voting rights are handicapped in their ability to hold leaders to account when they are constrained by imperfect information (the inability to observe leader actions or the effects of those actions on their welfare). More importantly for the analysis here, though unfettered voting rights lower the individual costs of holding leaders accountable, they do not guarantee that challengers will emerge who can credibly commit to pursuing different policies than those of the incumbent.

Electoral accountability of leaders depends on the existence of such challengers. Ferejohn (1986) and Persson and Tabellini (2000) examine the case where credible challengers do not exist. Their absence substantially attenuates incumbent incentives to pursue the public interest (e.g., to provide public goods). These results extend immediately to the conflict setting: such leaders, even if elected, have limited incentives to win hearts and minds through the provision of public services.