Power Sharing: A Bad Concept?

The literature on power sharing keeps expanding. Recent interest probably started with the proliferation of power-sharing arrangements in post-conflict societies in the 1990s. Since then, power sharing has become equated with both centripetalism and consociationalism, power-sharing data bases have been constructed, and there is even talk of authoritarian power sharing. The result is increasing confusion about the concept to the point where it is worth asking: Is power sharing a bad concept? My paper intends to answer that question with Giovanni Sartori's guidelines for concept formation. My paper will show that power sharing and related concepts are not at the same level of the ladder of generality because at closer look, their defining features and empirical referents are different. As a consequence, we risk what Sartori calls the "boomerang effect" of conceptual stretching. In a previous paper (in print) I showed it to be a real problem for two particular cases. In this paper, I broaden the investigation, clarifying the concept of power sharing and ordering its semantic field. One aim is to convince colleagues never to use consociationalism and power sharing as synonyms ever again, a recommendation that very much goes against the current trend.