Feminist critics of power-sharing argue that consociational structures privilege ethnic groups and that power-sharing is “bad for women.” This article identifies a gap in the relatively new field of research on gender equality and ethno-national power-sharing, as the focus so far has been mainly on women’s political exclusion, with limited attention on the representation of women’s needs and interests through policy. In bringing together power-sharing literature, representation theory and a gendered understanding of institutions and change, this article issues a call for further research. The article proposes an analytical framework, to be applied in empirical research on: Where, why, and how substantive representation of women in post-conflict consociational political systems occurs? An initial examination of a case from Bosnia and Herzegovina is presented, demonstrating how the analytical framework can be applied on violence against women policy research. Even though Bosnia and Herzegovina was a lead in the Istanbul Convention ratification, in the implementation, the consociational conditions in decision-making have led to disparate directions. The article makes a contribution to existing analytical debates at the intersection of consociationalism and women’s representation and has a practical goal: drawing the attention of scholars to the study of substantive representation of women.

Cultural heritage (e.g., historic buildings, memorials and museums) has been used to construct and negotiate various identities and meanings in the present, specifically in the context of nation-states. In transforming the past into heritage, however, States may disregard other histories—ones which deviate from the historical narratives they promote. In this paper, I discuss the case of the Heritage Plan, Israel’s official cultural heritage policy. Specifically, by using the discursive approach, I expose and assess cases of silencing competing histories which would challenge the history promoted by the Heritage Plan. My findings suggest that, in addition to privileging Jewish heritage, the Heritage Plan is used as a mechanism for erasing competing, non-Jewish histories. This article presents three case-studies of silencing: the first investigates the Druze heritage center; the second inquires into Israeli heritage practices in the West Bank; the third examines the Castel national heritage site associated with the 1948 war. The analysis of these cases reveals how the Heritage Plan is guided by ethnic and religious factors, whereby heritage assets are not necessarily promoted according to their full historical value, but are instead used to sustain current power structures.

With the rise of social media, politicians face new challenges and opportunities in presenting their messages online to large and diverse constituencies. Populists especially have capitalized on social media to achieve wide electoral success. This paper explores populists’ opportunities to target their constituencies online using the case of India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Twitter. First, the structure of the BJP’s network on Twitter is analyzed through social network analysis. Second, a content analysis is used to examine the messages of important accounts in different networks clusters. The findings suggest the ruling party in India has the opportunity to employ microtargeting to siloed clusters within its network of supporters. This practice could damage democratic discourse by reducing the possibility of debate in the public square.

This article uses Margaret Somers’ and Charles Tilly’s work on discursive approaches to identity to argue that failures in Iraq’s sectarian power-sharing system, Al Muhasasa Al Ta’ifia, have led to the transformation of identity in the country. This is demonstrated by the emergence of a unitary nationalist protest movement, which has called for a civic state, as captured by the idea of Mawatana. This alternative system would represent Iraqis based on their citizenship as opposed to their sect or ethnicity. By tracing how and why a new shared identity emerged within the protest movement in Federal Iraq between 2011 and 2019, I demonstrate that conflict does not inevitably harden identities, as assumed by some scholars of consociationalism, but that it can also soften them and allow shared formulations to emerge. In addition, I examine how three of the main principles of consociationalism—proportionality, veto power, and elite pacts—contributed to the demobilization of this movement, preventing changes in identity from translating into a profound transformation of the Muhasasa system itself.

In this article, we explore the reasons why some ethnic groups tend to vote along ethnic lines while others do not. We argue that existing explanations for ethnic voting can be grouped into three main approaches: policy-based, grievance-based, and clientelism. However, we contend that inconsistencies in previous empirical research come from a failure to account for the political context in which ethnic voting occurs. Specifically, we argue that ethnic voting in democracies operates on a different logic than in non-democratic regimes. Our argument posits that policy- and grievance-based factors are the primary determinants of ethnic voting in democracies, whereas clientelist networks play a crucial role in understanding ethnic voting in autocratic regimes. To test our hypotheses, we use a sample of 428 ethnic groups from 33 African countries between 2005 and 2018, as well as a novel survey-based measurement of voting preferences among ethnic group members. Our findings support our hypotheses: in democratic regimes, grievance-based and policy-based explanations have strong explanatory power, whereas clientelism is the primary driver of ethnic bloc voting in autocracies. We conclude that both regime type and the different underlying mechanisms of clientelism require greater consideration in the research on ethnic voting.

By performing a manifesto content analysis, this article maps the discourse of secessionist parties on constitutional change cross-case (Belgium, Canada, Spain, and the UK) and over time (1990–2020). The results show that secessionist parties are pragmatic organizations that also advance devolutionist demands as a steppingstone toward full independence. Concerning framing, the results identify an increasing trend toward the articulation of a socioeconomic case for constitutional change. Political issues such as governance are also important. Instead, identity-based frames are much less prominent in their discourse. As strategic actors, secessionists take these decisions to enhance their position in the electoral market.

This article uses the case of the Covid-19 pandemic in Israel to examine whether there are differences in national identity between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated and how national identity is related to public views of the unvaccinated. A three-wave panel survey measuring national attachment, national chauvinism, and constructive patriotism from before and during the pandemic was used to trace differences in dimensions of national identity between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated and to explore their relationship to attitudes toward the unvaccinated. Findings indicated that national attachment was lower among the unvaccinated prior to the pandemic. However, regarding national chauvinism, there were no differences between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated over time; regarding constructive patriotism, there was a difference only in the third wave—at the end of the Covid-19 vaccination drive. The three dimensions of national identity were linked to negative attitudes toward the unvaccinated only at the end of the Covid-19 vaccination drive but not at the peak of the pandemic after the first lockdown. These findings are discussed in light of the current understanding of national identity during the pandemic.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 J. J. P. Wouters, Vernacular Politics in Northeast India: Democracy, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity (Oxford University Press, 2022).

The state has never been a central category in consociational analysis, but recent developments have put the state on the radar of consociational scholars. This article is the first to survey and systematize insights on the role of the state in consociational theory and practice. The article does so by providing an overview and review of the answers to three guiding questions. First, who owns the state? Second, what comes first—consociation or state building? Third, is there an inevitable tradeoff between consociationalism and state strength? All these questions and answers have normative and empirical dimensions, and this article seeks to make a contribution to both. Empirically, the article formulates a research agenda. Theoretically and normatively, the article sketches an original consociational approach to the state that goes back to the early days of the Westphalian state system and has surprising relevance in today’s world.

This paper uses Iraq as a case study to answer the research question, how do consociational settlements impact the state? Firstly, the paper argues that consociationalism, at best, has an under-theorized conception of the state, implicitly defaulting to an unexamined neo-Weberian model. The paper then surveys state theory and finds that key works on the state in the Middle East are vulnerable to the postcolonial critique of Eurocentrism. To overcome this, the paper deploys the works of Mann, Jessop, and Bourdieu to develop a universal model of the state, disaggregating the state, conceiving of it as a series of competitive fields, bureaucratic, political, coercive, and economic. The paper then uses this model to assess how a consociational political settlement impacts upon the state. Deploying a disaggregated model of the state, the paper argues that Iraq’s consociational settlement shifted the balance of power in the bureaucratic field away from any autonomous power or centralized coherence that the institutions and the civil service possessed toward the political parties empowered by the consociational system. After being empowered by the informal consociational settlement, it is the political parties who now dominate the system for their own ends.