Consociationalism as Regime: Mapping the Trajectories of Power-Sharing Systems

This article develops a typology of regime trajectories in consociational power-sharing systems. Although consociationalism is designed to stabilize divided societies through inclusive power-sharing, the democratic trajectories that emerge from these arrangements diverge considerably over time. The article reconceptualizes power-sharing as a regime logic operating through accountability structuration, a recursive mechanism through which consociational rules embed and reorganize preexisting horizontal accountability (PHA) configurations within segmented governance, structuring whether those configurations are preserved, immobilized, or progressively eroded over time. Three ideal-type outcomes emerge from this mechanism: Segmental Democracy, in which inclusion operates within preserved horizontal accountability; Institutional Deadlock, in which fragmented vetoes paralyze governance; and Segmental Regime Entrenchment, in which inclusionary rules are repurposed to consolidate elite control and suppress oversight. The argument is anchored in a paradigmatic analysis of North Macedonia and applied comparatively to Lebanon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belgium, and Northern Ireland—the latter treated as a sub-state variant whose accountability conditions are structurally inherited from the encompassing UK framework. The framework explains how similar institutional architectures yield divergent regime trajectories depending on the accountability environment into which power-sharing is introduced.