Decisions about voting rules can be regarded as one of the four most important choices structuring sociopolitical relationships, each of which has implications for ethnic representation, the central concern of this essay. Unlike the other three major choices—choosing between a unitary versus a federal system,¹ choosing a parliamentary as opposed to a presidential system,² and choosing between imposing a set of universally applicable laws on all citizens versus arrangements that allow for religious- or ethnic-specific laws and lawmaking bodies to govern many aspects of day-to-day life—specific electoral system rules are rarely constitutionalized.³ Thus while electoral systems tend to...

In ethnically divided places, exclusion from government tends to be associated with exclusion in the wider polity (Horowitz 1993). Centripetalism, as developed and defended by Donald L. Horowitz, is seen as a novel strategy for the design of political institutions intended to mitigate this sense of exclusion. Centripetalism, sometimes called the integrative approach, is thought to encourage minority influence on majority decision making through the use of electoral rules that necessitate cross-ethnic appeals on the part of political leaders. The underlying assumption is that leaders must be given incentives to “make moderation pay” (Horowitz 1990). Calling the electoral system “the...

On June 13, 2010, a new Belgian federal parliament was elected. The elections had been held earlier than scheduled following the resignation of the federal government that had been unable to find an agreement between the Dutch-speaking and the French-speaking parties on the boundaries of the Brussels electoral district. That issue remained on the table when negotiations started to form a new federal coalition, together with a possible change in the distribution of powers between the federal and the sub-state level, and a possible adjustment of the financial equalization mechanisms. Parties of both language groups in Belgium deeply disagreed on...

Can rational choice provide a model that explains sustained moderate or conflict-regulating power-sharing behavior in deeply divided places? This is the question addressed in this chapter. I start with a model of extremist behavior developed previously (Wintrobe 2006a, 2006b). The first third of the chapter outlines the basics of that model. The second third applies it to the problem of conflict versus accommodation. I then provide two illustrations: a brief discussion of the circumstances under which federalism can work and then a more detailed one of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Specifically, I discuss the erection of the wall between Israel and...

Contrary to the conventional assumptions of the moment, religion has been a means for political accommodation, integration, and stability in the Middle East for most of half a millennium, if not more. The forces that have converted it into a source for conflict over recent centuries have arisen not from the intrinsic qualities of religion itself but rather from the corrosive effects of French and Scottish notions, such as the Enlightenment, and a few of its consequences: notably the bizarre fancies that one can and should fathom the popular will, that it should exercise power, that there is such a...

To consider the future of democracy in Iraq, Pakistan, Russia, and other troubled places requires a theory of its social conditions. And in fact, the future of democracy anywhere cannot be taken for granted. Democracy is not an all-or-nothing condition: either you have it or you do not. Varying degrees of democracy have been created over the years and have declined as well. The United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union will not necessarily be as democratic in the future as they are now. The degree of democracy needs explaining using comparative-historical theory.

Some societies are said to...

As my colleague Richard Pildes (2004) has proclaimed, we are in the Age of Democracy. Today more citizens participate in popular elections of government than at any other time in the history of world affairs. Democratization movements throughout the world have produced institutions of self-governance in regions where this was previously unthinkable. Even countries deep in the throes of tyranny or kleptocracy attempt to maintain a veneer of participatory engagement by their citizens, hoping perhaps that the act of casting a ballot serves as a sudden guarantee of legitimacy.

The welcome expansive role of elections once again raises questions as...

All independent democratic states have a degree of cultural diversity, but for comparative purposes we can say that, at any given time, states may be divided analytically into three different categories:

1. states that have strong cultural diversity, some of which is territorially based and politically articulated by significant groups that in the name of nationalism and self-determination advance claims to independence;

2. states that are significantly culturally diverse but whose diversity is nowhere organized by territorially based, politically significant groups mobilizing nationalist claims for in de pen dence; and

3. states in which a community, sufficiently culturally homogeneous to consider itself a...

On July 22, 2008, Serbian security forces surprised the world by finally arresting Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadžić, captured on a bus as he traveled about Belgrade disguised as a New Age guru. The International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) had indicted Karadžić twelve years earlier on eleven counts of genocide, complicity in genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian wars of 1992–95. The allegations included organizing the siege of Sarajevo where ten thousand people died and orchestrating the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 where the Bosnian Serb army killed around eight thousand...

Some commentators argue (pace McGarry and O’Leary 2006) that power sharing cannot provide a durable solution to intractable identity-based conflicts (Sisk 2003) but instead “provides only a temporary lull” in the conflict and may even “freeze group boundaries” and “heighten latent ethnic identities” (Norris 2005, 3). Perhaps what is needed to ensure the ultimate success of power-sharing initiatives is more input from social psychology. This is what Abrams and Hogg might argue given their claim that social psychology occupies a “pivotal position” in the social sciences and is ideally placed to link the micro- and macrolevels of analysis and to...

Power sharing is generally thought of in terms of various constitutional arrangements made for different political parties representing contending groups to share power. But does it need to end there? Can power sharing be extended to include “the people” in some way, and if this is done is it a good idea? Will it help the political process or will it make decision making in deeply divided places more difficult? Public opinion and public opinion research were used to help the Northern Ireland parties negotiating the Belfast Agreement reach their historic accord in April 1998. Since then these same methods...

Former Yugoslavia has been a fertile ground for experimentation with power sharing since the mid-1990s. Proposals for varying forms of power sharing have been made by international actors in numerous peace plans and by domestic actors for nearly every country or region that emerged from Yugoslavia. The power-sharing arrangements that emerged in former Yugoslavia were established to accommodate competing self-determination claims and/or to provide nondominant groups better and guaranteed access to governance. As such, these arrangements were all tools of conflict management, even if not all of them came about as a consequence of violent conflict. Today Bosnia and Herzegovina...

This chapter provides a comparative analysis of different institutional approaches to dealing with antagonistic group identity claims on the city. I discuss Brussels, Johannesburg, Belfast, Sarajevo, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Kirkuk. These cities are broken down into three categories: (1) cities that have utilized power sharing and forms of transitional democratization effectively enough that stability of the local and national state has occurred, (2) cities that have made some progress but are vulnerable to regression because local political arrangements are not sufficiently stabilizing, and (3) cities where power sharing is itself contested and a potential contributor to further instability.

In a...

On July 22, 2008, the Iraqi Parliament passed the provincial elections law with 127 of the 142 members present voting in favor. Kurdistan’s members of the Baghdad Parliament did not attend the vote, having staged a walkout in protest over the inclusion of Article 24 of the law. This delayed elections in Kirkuk but mandated, in the meantime, power sharing among the governorate’s three main ethnic groups (Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen) on the basis of parity.¹ A day later, the law was vetoed by the Presidency Council, throwing into jeopardy the entire provincial elections process, a process viewed by many...

Leading analysts of power sharing have presented some of their recent and current research in this volume. They were not requested to provide comparative and empirical case studies directly to test commonly held hypotheses about power sharing; and they were not asked to supply case studies to illuminate mechanisms and processes that explain the correlations found in large-N studies. No shared research design was attempted here in which power-sharing successes and failures across the world were to be systematically compared to draw explanatory and policy conclusions from a representative sample. Such projects have begun, with varying degrees of success and...