The Myth of Consociationalism? Conflict Reduction in Divided Societies

Although advocates of consociationalism have asserted that there is solid empirical evidence supporting the use of power-sharing institutions in divided societies, previous quantitative tests of these theories suffer from serious data limitations and fail to take into account the conditional nature of institutional effects. The authors test the effect of (a) proportional representation (PR) over majoritarian electoral rules, (b) parliamentary over presidential or semipresidential arrangements, and (c) a federal over a unitary system in reducing conflict in a cross-country data set of 101 countries representing 106 regimes. The results undercut much of the previous empirical support for consociationalist arrangements in divided societies. Using a multiplicative specification, the authors find that PR and parliamentarism appear to exacerbate political violence when ethnic fractionalization is high, though the effect of federalism is less certain.