Neo-insitutional approach to consociationalism: the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina

One of the most popular and according to Timothy D. Sisk “critical to policy making” strategies of conflict management is the power-sharing model – understood as a set of mechanisms that promote inclusivity and balanced influence for all major groups in a society. Its primary version – consociationalism – has been implemented in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a basic toll of post-conflict reconstruction. However, since the very beginning the system has become a subject of discussion and criticism, while now it is obvious that it does not work and requires serious changes.

My aim is to show, using the neo-institutional perspective, the insufficiency of the rigidly institutional perspective of consociationalism that is focused on constitutional engineering and assumes that formal institutions should fill up the gap created by law social capital and trust. Thus, I rebutted the assumption that institutions are superior to the political actors and introduced a second, non-institutional variable – political actors – that should be treated as equally important during the post-conflict stabilization process.

In other words, either institutions or competitive political elites cannot be blamed for inefficiency since these two variables exist in a mutual interdependence and coherence of their patterns of behaviour influences the whole system. Moreover, in a post-conflict state deprived of this coherence, usual constrain effect created by institutions does not prevail and instead results in something like a rebound effect – abuse of institutions by actors. Chosen cases of this abuse, present in all elements of Bosnian consociational model, will be the main part of my presentation.