From Dayton to Bernese Jura: The Election of the Croat Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

AbstractAfter the signing of the Dayton Agreement, critical literature has attempted to portray consociation in Bosnia and Herzegovina as the predominant source of the country's political problems. At the same time, this literature has widely neglected the centripetal rules that have existed since the first elections of the tripartite Presidency. The paper analyzes the outcomes of the existing centripetal cross‐ethnic vote pooling rules. It concludes that such outcomes are negative and it then discusses a possible solution by drawing inspiration from the application of the Bernese Jura's geometric mean. The paper focuses on the election of the Croat member in the tripartite Presidency as representative of the least numerous ethnic group. We argue that the application of the geometric mean based upon results in Croat‐majority municipalities could eliminate certain grievances and weakens the chances for election of the Croat member by voters from dominantly Bosniak areas.