Power Sharing and Patronage Ethnic Politics: The Political Economy of Ethnic Party Dominance in the Dayton Bosnia

The effectiveness of power sharing as a solution to ethnic conflict has long been a subject of scholarly debate. However, regardless of its supporters or critics, existing studies focus solely on the identity-based politician–citizen linkage within ethnic groups. In this paper, I use a patronage theory to examine the effect of power sharing on the material-based linkage between politicians and citizens, and I argue that power sharing has an effect to consolidate ethnic party dominance in post-settlement politics by solidifying the patronage system of governance. For empirical analysis, I examine the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods, I conclude that the Dayton Constitution, which lays down typical power sharing arrangements between three ethnic groups, has provided ethnic parties with numerous job opportunities in the public sector and that these parties could remain dominant by distributing these job opportunities as patronage.