Consociationalism as Political Grammar: Migrant Elites in South Tyrol and Northern Ireland

This paper examines how migrants perceive and experience consociational power-sharing systems, focusing on the perspectives of migrant associations as elite interlocutors. While consociational arrangements are designed to regulate political conflict between historically defined groups, little is known about how actors positioned outside these foundational cleavages interpret and navigate such institutional orders. Using a comparative case study of South Tyrol and Northern Ireland, the paper investigates how migrant elites understand the logics, practices, and everyday consequences of power-sharing governance. Drawing on qualitative interviews with representatives of migrant associations and key institutional actors, the study analyses how consociational mechanisms such as group-based representation, parity rules, and symbolic recognition are perceived from the standpoint of ‘outsiders to the system’. The findings show that migrant associations tend to interpret consociationalism less as a system of inclusion or exclusion and more as a rigid political grammar that structures access, voice, and legitimacy. Migrant elites experience power-sharing simultaneously as a stabilising framework that organises political life and as a bounded system in which participation requires translation into pre-existing group categories. The comparative analysis highlights how differing historical trajectories and institutional designs in South Tyrol and Northern Ireland shape migrants’ interpretations of power-sharing, ranging from pragmatic accommodation to critical distance. By foregrounding migrant elites’ lived engagement with consociational governance, the paper contributes to broader debates on power-sharing, political order, and the governance of diversity by showing how consociational systems are experienced beyond the groups they were originally designed to accommodate.