Editors Brendan O’Leary and Joanne McEvoy have assembled an enlightening and substantial volume on the current state of research on power-sharing systems in deeply divided places, as practiced by a distinguished collection of scholars. O’Leary is one of the world’s most outstanding comparativists working on this subject. He is the editor of a book series published by the University of Pennsylvania Press on power sharing in theory and practice, autonomism and federalism, nationalism, and ethnicity. This volume is one of the latest in this important series, and it significantly advances our understanding of the range and depth of research on power-sharing systems and the accommodation of ethnic and national diversity. I first outline some of the major features, as well as virtues, of this collection and then discuss some of the lacunae in the volume.
Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places contains a very useful and thoughtful Introduction by O’Leary, as well as a thorough Conclusion that ties together many of the themes of this project. Most of the chapters are focused on contemporary power-sharing systems. As he states in the Conclusion, authoritative scholars present some of their most recent research, and the chapters as a whole are intended to illuminate the current state and range of scholarship on power sharing across multiple disciplines (p. 386).
The Introduction provides us with a rather creative and broad definition of power sharing: “any set of arrangements that prevent one agent, or organized collective agency, from being the ‘winner who holds all critical power,’ whether temporarily or permanently” (p. 4).
Several aspects of the volume’s general approach to power-sharing systems are commendable, including its realistic and sensible approach to the political dynamics in complex multiethnic or multinational states. Thus, its referent is “deeply divided places.” As O’Leary explains, “places” is a better term than “societies,” given that it would be a mistake “to presume that a divided place contains just one society; that may be an issue of deep dispute, and a deeply divided place may be characterized by rival, parallel, or segregated societies. … In deeply divided places, standard stratifications are superseded, or profoundly reinforced, by further divisions of nationality, ethnicity, race, tribe, language, or religion” (p. 6).
The volume explicitly frames power-sharing strategies within the useful typology that O’Leary and John McGarry have been working on in the last decade or so on the continuum of constitutional strategies that contemporary states use to manage ethnic or national diversity. O’Leary further elaborates these strategies of integration and accommodation in his Introduction, considering how these divergent strategies differ in their goal orientations, types of political parties preferred, visions of federalism, their elective affinity for institutions, and their choice of electoral systems. Therefore, the volume is framed by the notion that accommodationist power-sharing strategies toward minorities come in four varieties: centripetalists, multiculturalists, consociationalists, and territorial pluralists (p. 20). As is well known, there is a lively debate within the power-sharing tradition between centripetalists (e.g., Donald Horowitz) and consociationalists (e.g., Arend Lijphart and O’Leary). The editors of this volume are not neutral observers in this debate: They are more sympathetic to consociationalism than centripetalism (pp. 33 and 412). Nevertheless, they present a balanced analysis of aspects of both centripetalism and consociationalism, as well as some forays into multiculturalism and territorial pluralism.
All of the chapters are good, and I highlight some of the more interesting ones. There is a useful chapter by Allison McCulloch that provides a clear analysis of the central claims of centripetalism, drawing on empirical evidence from Republika Srpska, Sri Lanka, and Fiji. She concludes that in deeply divided places, the centripetalists’ electoral system of choice, the alternative vote, is not likely to promote moderation. This chapter is complemented by the next one by Philippe Van Parijs and Kris Deschouwer, which puts forward a modest proposal for making Belgium’s federal and consociational system work better. The idea is to modify its electoral system by creating a multimember district of seats with a pan-Belgian configuration but with internal quotas of speakers. Benjamin Braude provides a fascinating comparison of the Ottoman and Safavid empires, contrasting Sunni and Shiite Islam and analyzing how they built inclusive political institutions.
There are a number of lacunae in the treatment of power-sharing systems. First, I believe that there is a tendency by the editors to employ an overbroad definition of power sharing. We should heed Samuel Issacharoff’s warning that “with any theory that expands too far comes the risk of losing the parsimony that lends itself to testing” (p. 216). Second, there are a number of well-known criticisms of consociationalism. It tends to “freeze” in place cultural practices or ethnic and national identities, likely reinforcing the causes of conflict. It is also said that it threatens certain cherished liberal values: individualism, equality of opportunity, or democratic competition (p. 412). Also, “crystallizing conflict at one point in time limits the range of electoral outcomes” (p. 216). In particular with respect to the “freezing identities” criticism, I think that the volume would have benefited from having a number of authors who tackled head-on this criticism, although O’Leary does cover some of this ground in the Introduction. The volume does this for some of the standard criticisms aimed at centripetalism (see chapter 3), but does not do so well enough for consociationalism.
Third, in Lijphart’s classic formulation, consociationalism has four main components, with the first two being the most important: executive power sharing, territorial or non-territorial autonomy, proportionality, and veto rights. Of these four elements, a number of chapters discuss veto rights, electoral systems, power-sharing institutions, and proportionality versus parity, and so on. Regarding the element of autonomy, only one author explicitly deals with this component, Alfred Stepan on federacies, although other authors partly address this component (Braude, Bieber, etc.). Just as there are thematic chapters on electoral systems and the mutual veto, it would have been better to see more discussion of autonomy, in particular because the classic literature on consociationalism has failed to even make a clear distinction between autonomism and federalism, which are two very different paradigms. (See Jaime Lluch, “Autonomism and Federalism,” Publius 42 [no. 1, 2011]: 134–61.)
Moreover, the one chapter that deals squarely with the segmental autonomy component is somewhat unsatisfactory. The Stepan chapter is an elaboration of Juan Linz and Stepan’s previous collaboration on this same topic. As O’Leary states, the concept of federacy was invented by Daniel Elazar and has generally lived an underground existence in comparative politics. In the world of real substate national movements and parties, the concepts used are autonomism and autonomy. The vexed concept of federacy is used only in the academic literature by political scientists. Stepan insists on citing David Rezvani’s work on federacies, which wrongly classifies Puerto Rico, the Basque Country, and Catalonia as federacies, none of which fit Linz and Stepan’s definition of federacy (see Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, et al., Crafting State-Nations: India and Other Multinational Democracies, 2011, p. 210). The Stepan chapter would have benefited from a close reading of the scholarship on territorial autonomies by Markku Suksi (especially on the Åland Islands—Finland relationship), Thomas Benedikter, Francesco Palermo, and so on.
These are all minor lacunae. Overall, this is the best edited volume I have seen to date on the current state of cutting-edge research on power-sharing systems.
