Power-sharing and managing ethnic heterogeneity in parliamentary and presidential systems

Power-sharing is a political institutional arrangement in which the joint participation of the representatives of different political segments of society in government is consistently reproduced. Although the idea of power-sharing was initially associated with the concept of consociational democracy, over time it has expanded beyond the consociational approach. The article is devoted to a comparative overview of empirical cases of power-sharing in presidential and parliamentary systems of government. Classifying power-sharing according to two criteria (type of parties and assignment of government positions to ethnic segments), four models can be distinguished. In parliamentary systems, the model closest to corporate consociationalism, when government positions are assigned to certain ethno-political segments through their parties, is more common. In presidential systems, on the contrary, a centripetal approach to power-sharing prevails; here, access of segments to power is ensured through interethnic parties without a strict assignment of government positions. These dependencies, however, are by no means rigid, since in all institutional models of power-sharing, countries with both parliamentary and presidential systems are found. As for the specific mechanisms of power-sharing implementation, there are no significant differences between parliamentary and presidential systems, with the exception of those mechanisms that arise from the fundamental differences between them. In terms of long-term managing ethnic heterogeneity, only less than half of the cases of power-sharing examined demonstrate effectiveness, and this does not depend on either the system of government or the institutional models of power-sharing.

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