Power sharing and institutional confidence: The case of Bosnia-Herzegovina

Today’s governing structure of Bosnia-Herzegovina was laid out in the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, which ended the almost four year long civil war. The Dayton agreement called for extensive power sharing on the national level, including a three-member rotating presidency and a federal structure. Ever since the signing of the agreement, the legitimacy of the state has been questioned. Different ideas of what the Bosnian state should be exist side by side, and the process towards a functional and legitimate democracy has stagnated. In this paper we ask if people’s attitudes toward the legitimacy of the state have changed since 1995. We use the European and World Values Surveys to explore variation in political trust. Our findings indicate that confidence in political institutions is in decline. We argue that postwar institutions face a trade-off between power sharing and efficiency. In the case of Bosnia, the political institutions saw strong initial support, but confidence dropped as the institutions failed to prove efficient. Even if power sharing is widely suggested as a solution to end civil war, we show that dysfunctional power sharing may hamper postwar reconciliation and statebuilding.