Power-sharing and Civil Conflict
Scott Gates (Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO) and Kaare Strøm (UCSD)
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the argument that power-sharing arrangements may reduce the risk of civil conflict by lessening the stakes of democratic political contestation by guaranteeing a role in the post-conflict government. As such, power-sharing implies the pursuit of one conception of democracy, ex post fairness, at the expense of others, such as ex ante uncertainty or performance sensitivity. We develop a game-theoretic model of power-sharing and show that its ability to promote civil peace depends in part on the relative military capacity of the fighting parties as well as the potential role of ―spoilers.‖ Our results demonstrate that in societies that are divided into antagonistic groups of roughly equal ability, and where the costs of conflict are high, power-sharing will be more likely than more majoritarian institutions to induce groups to quit fighting. Where groups are less evenly matched, however, power-sharing may produce undesirable consequences (e.g. non-proportional distributions of power, positive incentives for spoilers), thereby failing to reduce the risk of civil conflict.