Abstract
The decades-long debate about whether power sharing (consensus) governments or majoritarianism diminish conflict may be missing an even more important element in diminishing conflict, whether all major groups participate in negotiations. Using crucial moments in a regime’s history, the drafting and implementation of new constitutions, this article offers evidence that whether constitution-making processes include all relevant societal groups matters more in diminishing internal nation-state conflict than whether the resulting text constructs power-sharing institutions or majoritarian ones. After establishing this statistical pattern, we conduct further analysis showing that the mechanism of group rights establishment is at least partially responsible; that is, the inclusion of opposition groups in constitution drafting tends to produce group rights language.
