Repurposing rebellion: building rebel successor parties on the heels of war?

While rebels’ electoral participation has become a focal point of scholarship on post-conflict development, the drivers and process of rebels’ organizational transformation into political parties have remained elusive. Organizational theory provides a novel, yet critical, point of entry to understanding rebel-to-party transformation and the actors at the heart of it. I look inside rebels’ wartime organizations and identify a set of subdivisions (in some groups) that mirror the key structures of political parties: governance wings, political-messaging wings, and social service wings. I argue that variation in rebels’ wartime organizational structures gives rise to different party-building mechanisms with distinct prospects for success. To test this theory, I use intra-organizational comparative process tracing of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. Drawing on hundreds of archival documents, I create suborganizational biographies and trace their evolution from inception to transformation. This approach allows me to exploit systematic differences in the organizational structures of the FMLN’s subgroups—while holding equal other key variables like ideology, prewar networks, and state context—to demonstrate how the construction of proto-party structures during wartime facilitates party-building at the war’s end.