Does Power Sharing Freeze Ethnic Divisions? Reflections on the Reification Thesis

One of the most frequently encountered criticisms of power-sharing polities is that they entrench, freeze or reify communal divisions. Political settlements in Northern Ireland, Belgium and Bosnia are often believed to reinforce communal alignments, even if the benign objective may be to mitigate or lessen ethnic tensions. Such views are sometimes encouraged by advocates of power sharing themselves. For example, Arend Lijphart says of his preferred ‘consociational’ package of institutions that the intention is ‘not so much to abolish or weaken segmental cleavages but to recognise them explicitly and to turn the segments into constructive elements of stable democracy’ (1977 p42). Most frequently, the reification thesis is implicitly intended to press a counterfactual and largely literary or anecdotal case for integrative institutions that allegedly are able to mitigate or lessen ethnic tensions. The difficulty confronting researchers is that survey data permitting some investigation of these claims is either non-existent (Bosnia-Herzegovina), or ambivalent and difficult to interpret (Northern Ireland and Belgium). In this paper, I look at the available survey data for Northern Ireland and Belgium and consider several alternative explanations of the findings.