Power Sharing and Democracy From Below

• In Event: Conflict Management Institutions in Post-Conflict Governance

Abstract

Power sharing has been found to help mitigate the security concerns of civil war adversaries, thus making groups in post-conflict environments more open to adopting minimalist democracy as a form of conflict management (Hartzell and Hoddie 2015). Building on those findings, this paper explores whether or not power sharing generates institutional effects that facilitate democratization from below. More specifically, we investigate the effects power sharing has on equality among groups in the distribution of political power and equality among groups in the distribution of resources. We consider all states that have ended civil wars between the years 1945 and 2006. Our key explanatory variable is the number of power-sharing dimensions (political, military, territorial, and economic) adopted in the aftermath of civil war. We employ data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) project for our measures of equality in the post-war distribution of power and resources. Our claim is that by helping to foster greater inter-group equality, power sharing has the effect of enhancing citizens’ ability to participate politically, an effect that we refer to as helping to promote democracy ‘from below.’

Authors

• Caroline A. Hartzell, Gettysburg College

• Matthew Hoddie, Towson University