Principal Investigators:
- Andreas Mehler
- Martin Ottmann
Project Staff:
Project Summary:
How does power-sharing affect resource allocation between elites and constituencies in post-conflict situations? The question if and how power-sharing arrangements between a state government and former rebel groups actually change the distribution and exercise of political power in a post-conflict situation is rarely investigated. In this project, we argue that the type of power-sharing affects sub-national resource allocation patterns. Power-sharing provides an opportunity for former conflict actors to access state resources and distribute those resources strategically to their constituencies. Ultimately, this implies that power-sharing is less a tool for transforming political power (and thus addressing the root causes of social conflict), but an instrument that institutionalizes patronage opportunities. The project relies on the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to substantiate these hypotheses: We first use statistical geo-spatial methods in order to investigate power-sharing as mechanism for sub-national resource redistribution to core constituencies. This analysis will make use of global data on post-conflict situations between 1992 and 2010. Central to this effort will be the creation of a novel dataset, the Geographical Dimensions of Power-Sharing Dataset (GDPS) which geo-locates the constituencies of all government and rebels in post-conflict situations. In a second step, we will conduct qualitative within-case analyses and in-depth process tracing of two post-conflict situations: Liberia and the Indonesian province of Aceh. This qualitative analysis will be based on field research in each post-conflict situation to better understand causal processes and scope conditions.
Publications
Felix Haass, Martin Ottmann.
The Effect of Wartime Legacies on Electoral Mobilization after Civil War.
Journal of Politics. 84 (3). Online First,
2022.
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Abstract
Elections are cornerstones for societies transitioning from civil war to democracy. The success or failure of these elections is shaped by the strategies former rebels employ to mobilize voters. Of those strategies, clientelism is particularly important as it represents improved voter-elite relations over dysfunctional wartime politics, but, if pervasive, also risks undermining long-term democratic consolidation. We argue that the organizational legacies of rebellion shape the way how rebels engage in electoral clientelism. We expect that former rebels target pre-electoral benefits to areas of wartime support; rely on wartime military networks to deliver those benefits; and exploit discretionary control over peace dividends when allocating electoral benefits. We combine original geospatial data on the timing and location of over 2,000 tsunami aid projects with village-level surveys in post-civil war Aceh, Indonesia, to test these hypotheses. Results from difference-in-differences models and detailed tests of causal mechanisms are consistent with our theoretical expectations.
Felix Haass, Martin Ottmann.
Rebels, Revenue, and Redistribution. The Political Geography of Post-Conflict Power-Sharing in Africa.
British Journal of Political Science. 51(3): 981-1001.,
2021.
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Do rebel elites who gain access to political power through power-sharing reward their own ethnic constituencies after war? We argue that power-sharing governments serve as instruments for rebel elites to access state resources. This access allows elites to allocate state resources disproportionately to their regional power bases, particularly the settlement areas of rebel groups’ ethnic constituencies. To test this proposition, we link information on rebel groups in power-sharing governments in African post-conflict countries to information about ethnic support for rebel organizations. We combine this information with sub-national data on ethnic groups' settlement areas and data on night light emissions to proxy sub-national variation in resource investments. Implementing a difference-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that regions with ethnic groups represented through rebels in the power-sharing government exhibit higher levels of night light emissions than those regions without such representation. Our findings help to reconceptualize post-conflict power-sharing arrangements as rent-generating and redistributive institutions.
Felix Haass.
The Democracy Dilemma. Aid, Power-Sharing Governments, and Post-Conflict Democratization.
Conflict Management and Peace Science, 38(2): 200-223. (Published Online First in 2019),
2021.
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Online Appendix
How does development aid shape democracy after civil conflicts? I argue that political aid conditionalities and the economic utility that recipient elites gain from office give rise to a rent-seeking/democracy dilemma: recipients can initiate democratic reforms but also risk uncertainty over office and rents. Or they can refuse to implement such reforms, but risk losing aid rents if donors reduce aid flows in response to failed democratic reforms. This dilemma is strongest in power-sharing cabinets. By granting rebel groups temporally limited access to the state budget, such cabinets intensify elites’ rent-seeking motives. Thus, aid-dependent power-sharing elites will hold cleaner elections, but also limit judicial independence and increase particularistic spending to simultaneously reap aid benefits and remain in power. I find statistical support for this argument using data on aid flows and power-sharing governments for all post-conflict states between 1990 and 2010.
Felix Haass, Martin Ottmann.
Profits from Peace: The Political Economy of Power-Sharing and Corruption.
World Development, 99: 60-74,
2017.
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Online Appendix
Does power-sharing drive corruption in post-conflict countries? We conceptualize government elites in any post-conflict situation as rent-seeking agents who need to ensure the support of their key constituencies to remain in power. Power-sharing institutions-especially cabinet-level, executive power-sharing institutions-systematically shape these rent-seeking motives. Power-sharing cabinets create political coalitions dominated by small circles of government and rebel elites with direct access to state resources and low levels of loyalty toward the government leader. Also, the provisional nature of many power-sharing institutions increases rent-seeking incentives: facing a limited time horizon in office, rent-seeking elites within the power-sharing coalition are likely to capture as many rents as possible before they have to leave office. Thus, post-conflict countries with power-sharing institutions should exhibit higher aggregated levels of rent-seeking measured as the level of corruption in a country. In a statistical analysis of all post-conflict situations during 1996-2010, we find that power-sharing cabinets substantively increase corruption in post-conflict countries and that this effect is stronger in the presence of natural resource rents. These findings add quantitative evidence to the debate about drivers of post-conflict corruption. Moreover, they highlight a trade-off between short-term stability and long-term negative effects of corruption for post-conflict political and economic development.
