Replication Data for: Political Power Sharing in Post-conflict Democracies: Investigating effects on vertical and horizontal accountability

While it may be necessary to secure elite buy-in to peaceful competition, the literature is pessimistic about the long-term effects of a power-sharing settlement on the quality of democracy. Designing institutions to guarantee political inclusion is commonly thought to undermine vertical and horizontal accountability by incentivising rent-seeking over responsiveness to voters. This study employs data from the Varieties of Democracy project to test arguments about the pernicious institutional effects of political power-sharing settlements in post-conflict democracies, relying on a panel dataset of 28 conflict-prone states in Sub-Saharan Africa since the onset of democracy’s Third Wave (1990–2021). The analytical technique is a time-series linear regression distinguishing between upturns and downturns across a range of continuous measures of accountability (Teorell, Determinants of Democratization). The results show that, in line with much of the literature, political power-sharing settlements are associated with increasing executive corruption and fewer improvements in the rule of law. However, none of the other proposed mechanisms linking political power sharing to poor accountability outcomes finds consistent or significant support in the cross-national sample. Overall, these findings suggest that the relatively undemocratic institutional concessions designed to resolve conflict may not pose the serious barrier to democratic deepening and consolidation as previously assumed.尽管要为和平竞争争取精英群体的认同或许必不可少，但现有学术研究对权力分享协定对民主质量的长期影响持悲观态度。人们普遍认为，旨在保障政治包容性的制度设计，会通过激励寻租行为而非回应选民诉求，削弱纵向与横向问责机制。本研究依托民主多样性（Varieties of Democracy）项目的数据，以及1990-2021年民主第三波兴起以来撒哈拉以南非洲28个易冲突国家的面板数据集，旨在检验关于冲突后民主国家中政治权力分享协定所带来的有害制度效应的相关论点。本研究采用的分析方法为时间序列线性回归，可区分一系列连续性问责测度指标的升降波动（Teorell，《民主化的决定因素》）。研究结果显示，与多数现有研究的结论一致，政治权力分享协定与行政腐败加剧、法治建设进展放缓存在关联。然而，其余所有将政治权力分享与问责机制弱化挂钩的潜在机制，在跨国样本中均未获得一致且显著的支持。总体而言，本研究结果表明，为解决冲突而做出的相对非民主的制度让步，或许并不会如此前所设想的那样，对民主深化与巩固构成严重阻碍。