Political power sharing in post-conflict democracies: investigating effects on vertical and horizontal accountability

Johnson, Chelsea ORCID: 0000-0003-4849-1825 (2023) Political power sharing in post-conflict democracies: investigating effects on vertical and horizontal accountability. Democratization, 30 (6). pp. 1-25.

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2023.2214085

Abstract

While it may be necessary to secure elite buy-in to peaceful competition, the literature is pessimistic about the long-term effects of a power-sharing settlement on the quality of democracy. Designing institutions to guarantee political inclusion is commonly thought to undermine vertical and horizontal accountability by incentivizing rent-seeking over responsiveness to voters. This study employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project to test arguments about the pernicious institutional effects of political power-sharing settlements in post-conflict democracies, relying on a panel dataset of 28 conflict-prone states in Sub-Saharan Africa since the onset of democracy’s Third Wave (1990–2021). The analytical technique is a time-series linear regression distinguishing between upturns and downturns across a range of continuous measures of accountability. The results show that, in line with much of the literature, political power-sharing settlements are associated with increasing executive corruption and fewer improvements in the rule of law. However, none of the other proposed mechanisms linking political power sharing to poor accountability outcomes finds consistent or significant support in the cross-national sample. Overall, these findings suggest that the relatively undemocratic institutional concessions designed to resolve conflict may not pose the serious barrier to democratic deepening and consolidation as previously assumed.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Power sharing, post-conflict transitions, democratization, vertical accountability, horizontal accountability
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	31 May 2023 15:14
Last Modified:	06 Sep 2023 14:13
DOI:	10.1080/13510347.2023.2214085
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3170767