Ethnic and Partisan Power Sharing in Interwar Europe

• In Event: The Promises and Perils of Power-Sharing in Global Perspective

Abstract

How do political parties influence governmental power sharing arrangements in post-conflict states? I argue that partisan actors should be central to the study of power sharing. Existing quantitative work on power sharing frequently deals with abstract actors such as governments and rebels or ethnic groups. By design, this work side-steps pre-existing government coalitions, non-ethnic parties, and other relevant ethnic groups that were not directly involved in previous armed conflicts. In this paper, I explore the effect of parliamentary and governmental representation of ethnic groups in interwar Europe on government stability and peace. I introduce new data on the parliamentary and governmental representation of ethnic groups and political parties in European democracies between 1919 and 1939. The new data provide details on non-ethnic cleavages such as ideology, parliamentary and government composition in more than 300 cabinets, and link ethnic groups to political parties via political claims at the national level. Using information on civil wars and non-state conflicts from the Correlates of War project, I retest the link between power sharing and peace in the interwar period. In addition to the descriptive quantitative evidence, qualitative case observations contribute to a better understanding of the interplay of ethnic representation through political parties.

Authors

• Lea Kaftan, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

• Stefan Stojkovic

• Nils-Christian Bormann, Witten/Herdecke University