Abstract
While power-sharing has been widely promoted as a tool for stabilizing divided societies, very few studies have assessed its impact on democratic quality, and none have examined the distinct effects of inclusive, dispersive, and constraining power-sharing. To address this gap, I constructed a dataset of 155 countries between 1975 and 2015, and analyzed, with a two-way fixed effects model, how power-sharing influences both overall democratic quality and its institutional components. Constraining power-sharing had the most consistent and significant positive effect on democratic quality. Dispersive power-sharing showed modest but insignificant benefits, while inclusive power-sharing was associated with a negative, though also insignificant, relationship with democratic quality. Further analysis demonstrated that these trends persisted regardless of post-conflict context, challenging assumptions that such institutional arrangements are inherently less effective in such environments. The findings call into question the prevailing emphasis on political power-sharing institutions and bring attention to constraining power-sharing, which remains under-researched.
