The Political Economy of Power-Sharing

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. The proposed 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.