Accommodating Liberal Consociations: The District Brčko Case and the Role of Informal Institutions in the Consociational Model

ABSTRACT

Assuming the primacy of established patterns of bargaining over the formal ones, in transitional, unstable settings—well-known to the power-sharing systems—informal institutions can emerge as the preponderant rules of interaction. Yet, there is significant negligence in the power-sharing literature that should have been devoted to the informalities embedded in the political systems of divided societies. Filling in this gap, the paper analyses the creation, role and meaning of informal institutions in the consociational model. Using the case study of the Brčko District in Bosnia and Herzegovina and framework offered by Helmke and Levitsky (‘Informal institutions and comparative politics: A research agenda’, Perspectives on Politics, 4, 724–740, 2004), it claims that the presence of informal-corporate institutions is crucial for the functioning of its consociational system and necessary to accommodate the existing formal-liberal ones. The detailed case study analysis brings conclusions that could extend the current understanding of the power-sharing model and tackle the debate about liberal consociationalism being the preferred version of power sharing.

Acknowledgements

The author is thankful to the journal’s editors, reviewers, and Allison McCulloch, Timofey Agarin and Drew Mikhael for their comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A set of solutions that range between the consociational and centripetal models defined as practices and institutions that result in governance structures which have a broad social support and comprise all main social groups (Sisk, 2002, p. vii).

2 Having a strategic location on the so-called corridor, a narrow lynchpin that connected the Serb-held regions in Western Bosnia with those in Eastern Bosnia and Serbia itself, the area was of particular importance to the Serbian military during the war and to Serbian politicians after the war in their efforts to ensure the territorial contiguity of the RS (Stjepanović, 2014, p. 3).

3 On 31 August 2012, the OHR formally suspended the supervision, which meant leaving the supervisory regime in legal force but ending active oversight and closing the OHR Brčko Office (Stjepanović, 2014, p. 8; Moore, 2013, p. 158).

4 If the district had been built around the idea of integration equaled with the centripetal approach, its post-conflict reconstruction would have been based on the following principles of Horowitz’s model: dispersed power (which frequently has territorial character), devolution of power and division of offices on an ethnic basis (which should increase intra-ethnic mobilization), incentives for increasing inter-ethnic cooperation (like electoral law favourable to electoral coalitions), support for cross-cutting cleavages, and reduction of inequalities between groups (Sisk, 2002, pp. 34–35, 40). While consociationalism concentrates on the parliamentary arena, or in other words, on the decision-making processes and the role of elites, centripetalism puts an emphasis on the electoral arena and the electorate, aiming at triggering moderate behaviour (Choudhry, 2008, p. 22).

5 Article 60 of the Statute requires that there should be a police chief and two deputies, which is an informal reference to the ethnic quota principle. There is also an injunction (Art. 47.1) that The Deputy Mayor, the Government Chief Coordinator, and the Heads of Departments should ‘reflect the composition of the population’.

6 Today, to be granted membership, they must apply (Simić, 2015; Burić, 2015).

7 According to the Assembly’s internal rules, a simple majority is required only for documents like decisions, declarations or resolutions, absolute majority is required mostly for translations, the rest requires at least a three-fifths majority (Poslovnik, art. 93-97). What is more, an absence or abstention of a councillor would count as a no vote; a law which has 17 votes for, no votes against and 12 abstentions (or 0 abstentions, but 12 councillors simply do not attend) would fail to pass (Parish, 2009, pp. 163–164).