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Civil conflicts typically end with negotiated settlements, but many settlements fail, often during the implementation stage when average citizens have increasing influence. Citizens sometimes evaluate peace agreements by voting on referendums or the negotiating leaders, and, almost always, they decide whether to cooperate. Yet, despite their role, we do not know much about how citizens form attitudes toward peace agreements. In this article, we assess how citizens form attitudes toward settlements, specifically the policy provisions that emerge from them, which are central in shaping the post-conflict context. These are complex policy changes, involving deeply factionalized actors, and the citizens evaluating them are often focused on rebuilding their lives. We therefore theorize that citizens use stark cues from political elites with whom they have affinity to form their attitudes. We test our theory using survey experiments in Colombia. We find that citizens rely on political elites' cues to decide their stance on the settlement's provisions. These cues appear to supply easily-accessible information that respondents use over other information. In contrast to work positing that peace agreements are exceptional and weary citizens are stabilizing forces, our results suggest that even these decisions are politics as usual, where divisions among political elites drive the outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent are legislators, responsible for the implementation of many peace agreements, responsive to citizens' preferences? Examining the 2016 Colombian peace agreement, we embed an experiment in the 2019 wave of a survey of all the members of Congress. We inform legislators about the attitudes of the general population and residents of conflict-affected regions on a provision included in the peace agreement: the creation of 16 special seats in the House of Representatives reserved for conflict areas. We find that legislators underestimate citizen support for this policy, and the magnitude of their misconception is correlated with the positions of their parties on the issue. Moreover, we find that providing information about citizens' support for the policy does not affect legislator support for the provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]