The plight of civic parties in divided societies

DOI10.1177/0192512119859349
Date01 January 2020
Published date01 January 2020
Subject MatterSpecial Issue Articles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512119859349
International Political Science Review
2020, Vol. 41(1) 73 –88
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512119859349
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The plight of civic parties in
divided societies
Cera Murtagh
Villanova University, USA
Abstract
Civic political parties in divided societies occupy an ambiguous place in the power-sharing literature.
Scholarship tends to focus on ethnic parties and assumes civic actors to be marginal. The empirical reality
tells a different story: civic parties have contributed to peace, stability and democracy in some of the world’s
most deeply divided places by playing a mediating role, acting as a moderating force and representing
otherwise marginalised groups. Drawing from interviews with representatives from civic parties, ethnic
parties and civil society in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and broader institutional analysis,
I argue that civic parties’ survival can be explained by the fact that they meet therein not only with barriers
but also critical openings. They adapt to this opportunity structure, with different party types developing
under different forms of power-sharing. In illustrating the relationship between governance models and civic
parties, this article underlines the importance of post-settlement institutional design.
Keywords
Civic political parties, power-sharing, divided societies, Northern Ireland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, post-
settlement institutional design
Introduction
Civic political parties represent a marginal subject of interest in the study of democracy in divided
societies. In consociational power-sharing systems, where institutions have been explicitly
designed to manage division by accommodating communal identities, non-ethnic parties hold a
particularly ambiguous place. On one side of the debate, advocates tend to dismiss civic actors as
somewhat irrelevant, their support negligible and their exclusion justified for the sake of peace and
stability. On the other, critics have assumed civic parties to be categorically excluded under conso-
ciational structures, leaving them peripheral, vulnerable and transient. This theoretical marginality
lies at odds with the empirical reality, however. Far from non-existent, civic parties have emerged
and endured in societies as deeply divided as Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Africa, India and
Corresponding author:
Cera Murtagh, Department of Political Science, St Augustine Center 263, Villanova University, 800 E. Lancaster Avenue,
Villanova, PA 19085, USA.
Email: cera.murtagh@villanova.edu
859349IPS0010.1177/0192512119859349International Political Science ReviewMurtagh
research-article2019
Special Issue Article
74 International Political Science Review 41(1)
Burundi, often under rigid consociational conditions. Indeed, many have exerted a significant
impact on their political environments; for example, making key contributions to peace negotia-
tions and agreements, in the cases of Northern Ireland and South Africa (Fearon, 1999; Mitchell,
2002), assuming pivotal roles in power-sharing executives in Northern Ireland (Mitchell, 2015),
and, indeed, leading power-sharing coalitions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Burundi (Hulsey,
2015; Vandeginste, 2017). In a range of divided political contexts, under distinct institutional
arrangements, these parties have formed, sustained and played a distinctive role.
This article addresses the puzzle of civic parties’ survival within divided societies, particularly
under consociational power-sharing, by comparatively analysing the political opportunity structure
they navigate in such contexts and how they adapt to their institutional environments. The goal of
this article is thus to explain the endurance of civic parties in these settings and to systematise the
relationship between civic parties and post-settlement institutions. In so doing, it offers a concep-
tual framework for the analysis of this under-studied phenomenon. The article draws upon empiri-
cal evidence from two classic cases of consociation that respectively exhibit the distinct forms of
consociational power-sharing distinguished in the literature, corporate and liberal: Bosnia and
Herzegovina (BiH) and Northern Ireland. This nested comparison is embedded within a broader
analysis of a range of deeply divided societies that feature power-sharing. From this analysis, the
article finds that civic parties in power-sharing frameworks face both barriers and opportunities
and that they survive by creatively navigating these openings and constraints. In illustrating the
relationship between post-conflict governance models and civic parties, this article underlines the
importance of institutional design for the form of politics and political actors that emerge and
endure in post-settlement settings and the role civic actors can play therein.
Theories of democracy in divided societies and the place of
‘others’
In international peacebuilding, consociational power-sharing has risen to prominence in the last 25
years (Bell, 2015). First theorised by Lijphart (1977), consociation is a model for the governance
of divided places based on the recognition of the main groups in society and their accommodation
within the political system via elite representation. It entails four key conditions: grand coalition
government comprising all significant groups; mutual veto to protect groups’ vital interests; pro-
portionality in public office and resources; and, segmental autonomy (Lijphart, 1977: 25).
Criticisms of the model have been levelled from a range of angles. On a practical level, critics cite
problems of adoptability, sustainability and governance, pointing to the model’s proneness to dead-
lock and dysfunction (Horowitz, 2014). Furthermore, far from comprising the seeds of its own
decomposition, consociation has been accused of institutionalising divisions (Wilson, 2010). On a
normative level, consociation has faced the charge of excluding groups and individuals beyond the
dominant communities recognised in the settlement, thus marginalising other forms of identity
such as gender and class, as well as those who simply do not align with any of the main groups
(Kennedy et al., 2016). In this sense, power-sharing has been presented as entailing an ‘exclusion-
amid-inclusion’ (EAI) dilemma: while including the main groups to the conflict, it inadvertently
excludes others, including shared, cross-cutting and alternative identities (Agarin et al., 2018;
Agarin and McCulloch, Introduction, this volume).
Consociationalists respond to these criticisms with robust realism. McGarry and O’Leary (2009)
challenge critics to demonstrate an alternative system capable of providing the same level of peace
and stability that consociation has delivered. They also point to innovations in the theory and prac-
tice of power-sharing, overlooked by critics, most notably the distinction between corporate and
liberal power-sharing (McGarry and O’Leary, 2007). The differentiation is based on whether the

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