DescriptionRebel governance appears to provide some of the raw materials necessary for democratization. Despite this, rebel governance does not appear to uniformly produce more democratic governance in the wake of civil wars. To address this, I develop a theory which predicts that rebels who cultivate political consciousness among their charges by eliciting input into their own administration contribute to postwar democratization. To test the theory, I adapt a rebel governance framework which emphasizes outputs—rather than the structures which produce them—and applied this framework to a novel dataset of 79 civil wars which ended between 1980 and 2006. I then test the theory using regression and proportional hazard models as well as by examining four cases in greater detail. These quantitative models show that feedback mechanisms—regular points of interaction between governor and governed—correlate with more democratic governance after civil wars and accelerate democratic transitions. The case studies confirm that building consciousness contributes to postwar democratic transition. These results suggest that regular interactions between rebels and civilians is an important factor in determining whether a state emerges from a civil war with more democratic governance than the status quo ante.