Voting Behavior Across Ethnopolitical Contexts in Bosnia and Herzegovina

Criticisms of the Dayton Accords and resulting constitution for Bosnia and Herzegovina focus on the ways in which the constitutional structure of the country reinforces the role of ethnicity in politics. This paper evaluates the degree to which the ethnopolitical context of an election shapes voting behavior. Ethnopolitical context varies across regions and levels of elections in Bosnia whereby some elections for cantonal elections occur in effectively mono-ethnic contexts while other cantons as well as elections to entity and state-level elections take place for bodies which are multi-ethnic. This analysis takes advantage of precinct-level data in recent Bosnian general elections, wherein voters vote simultaneously for two or three levels of government, to analyze the degree to which vote choice shifts based on differences in ethnopolitical context. This design allows a comparison between precincts whose voters must make choices across different contexts and those whose voters vote in similar contexts for all three elections. The results of this analysis have implications for our understanding of the ways in which consociational systems may reinforce ethnicity as well as the interplay of ethnopolitical context across levels of government.