Power-sharing executives

There is widespread if not universal agreement among political scientists that power-sharing, permanent or temporary, offers workable means to prevent, resolve or regulate violent ethnic conflicts. ‘Proportional’ democracies are less violent than ‘majoritarian’ democracies (Powell 1982, 2000) and consensual democracies, according to numerous criteria, outperform winner-take-all democracies (Lijphart 2008, 2012). The evidence on other criteria has not settled among political scientists or economists. ² Using key developmental and stability indicators, it has been argued in a large-N study, supplemented by paired case studies, that all kinds of regimes, including non-democratic regimes, which exhibit some power-sharing institutions and practices, outperform those that do not (Norris 2008). More crucially for ethnopolitics, power-sharing provisions in the commitments of peace agreements appear to reduce the likelihood of violent conflict recurrence (Mattes and Savun 2009).