Power Sharing in Deeply Divided Places

16. Power Sharing: An Advocate's Conclusion

CHAPTER 16 Power Sharing: An Advocate’s Conclusion Brendan O’Leary Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be. . . . Utopia and reality are . . . the two facets of political science. Sound political thought and sound political life will be found only where both have their place. —Edward Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis Leading analysts of power sharing have presented some of their recent and current research in this volume. They were not requested to provide comparative and empirical case studies directly to test commonly held hypotheses about power sharing; and they were not asked to supply case studies to illuminate mechanisms and processes that explain the correlations found in large-N studies. No shared research design was attempted here in which power-sharing successes and failures across the world were to be systematically compared to draw explanatory and policy conclusions from a representative sample. Such projects have begun, with varying degrees of success and rigor. Efforts to continue and refine them are entirely to be welcomed, and further comment on such projects occurs below. The chapters in this volume are intended, however, to illuminate the current state and range of scholarship on power sharing across multiple disciplines. Rather than summarize each of the chapters, a task already performed in the introduction and accomplished more extensively by the authors themselves, this conclusion focuses on general questions raised by the contributors’ chapters and Conclusion 387 indicates future research avenues, especially among political scientists. Lastly, some normative questions are addressed. The jilted woman in “The Winner Takes It All,” sung by the Swedish pop group Abba, suggests she is wrong to lament her fate too long: only one lover can have her former partner; fate dictates that she has to fall while her rival stands tall. Her folk wisdom may be true of love between persons, at least in cultures that reject polygamy or polyandry, but does it have to be true in politics? Must the winner take it all? Power Sharing and Proportional Representation Part I of this book focuses on the role of electoral systems in promoting or inhibiting interethnic accommodation. It is widely agreed among political scientists, whether advocates of power sharing or otherwise, that power sharing is more likely to be encouraged if proportional representation (PR) systems are used to elect politicians. There is, however, a contrary claim, advanced by “centripetalists,” notably Donald Horowitz, who argue that power sharing may be best advanced through the so-called alternative vote (AV), more accurately known as the “majority-preferential vote.” This claim is skeptically scrutinized by Allison McCulloch (Chapter 3), who expresses the more common view within political science that the use of AV does not promote power sharing because the majority-preferential vote is a majoritarian system and as such is not conducive toward power sharing as standardly conceived. One response maintains that Arend Lijphart and his followers should not monopolize the use of the expression “power sharing” (Horowitz 2002). That may be so, but centripetalists’ conception of power sharing is idiosyncratic and not just distinct from that of consociationalists and multinational federalists. As standardly conceived, power sharing is directly inclusive, that is, the key partners to a power-sharing system, including minorities, represent themselves and jointly make key decisions in the polity. By contrast , centripetalists prefer a pattern of accommodation in which candidates and parties from ethnic majorities, at all tiers of government, are incentivized to accommodate minorities through obtaining lower-order preferences on the ballot papers of voters from minority backgrounds. In short, they prioritize better behavior by representatives from majorities rather than the direct election of minorities. Centripetalists place no strong value on minorities representing themselves and often emphasize a common and undifferentiated conception of citizenship. Regularly the metaphor of “pooling votes” is 388 Brendan O’Leary used as part of the advocacy of AV, which suggests “sharing.” Yet whether the lower-order preferences on ballot papers cast with first preferences for minorities constitute sharing may reasonably be questioned. They permit voters to rank unpalatable alternatives, not quite the everyday meaning of “pooling” or “sharing.” To avoid profitless dispute over the meaning of power sharing, it may be said that PR systems facilitate the forms of power sharing in which ethnic groups are free to represent themselves, if they wish to do so, through their own parties and candidates. They do so for straightforward reasons that do not...