This dissertation incorporates quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the impact of institutional engineering on levels of political violence in states emerging from civil war. Despite consensus on the conflict dampening potential of particular mechanisms, the promise of democratic peacebuilding has yet to be realized in many cases. Accounting for the divergence between expectations and outcomes, I assess the interactive effects of electoral system and power sharing arrangements on the propensity of former rebel movements and governments to pursue strategies of political violence or, conversely, compromise and cooperation. In contrast with existing research on democratic peacebuilding, which focuses largely on separate institutions and relies heavily on intensive, single case study methods, this project provides a variegated exploration into the interactive effects of particular institutional configurations. To facilitate a systematic, robust investigation, the research supplements the cross-sectional time-series methods, used to analyze a dataset of terminated intra-state conflicts after 1990, with two case studies.