Chapter 1 builds from the example of the Arab Spring uprisings to illustrate the importance of blame for authoritarian politics and its relevance to the stability of ruling monarchies. The chapter summarizes the book’s argument about how power sharing affects attributions under autocracy and how autocrats strategically try to limit their exposure to blame by delegating decision-making powers to other political elites. It then describes why autocratic monarchs are better positioned than other autocrats to avoid blame by sharing power. The chapter also discusses the book’s contributions to scholarship on authoritarianism, including how popular politics affect regime stability, when autocrats are more or less likely to share power, why autocratic monarchies have been so stable, and how power sharing and popular politics interact in authoritarian settings. The chapter ends with an outline of the remainder of the book.

Chapter 6 continues the Jordan case study by providing an important assessment of the theory’s expectations over time. Drawing on archival documents, internet search data, elite interviews, and secondary sources, the chapter shows that Jordan’s kings have shared power more credibly when they have more reasons to be concerned about popular discontent. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that Jordanians have responded to these changes as the theory expects, becoming more likely to blame the king for their grievances when the monarchy controls the decision-making process more directly, and less likely to blame the king when he delegates more credibly to other political elites. Not only do these findings demonstrate the theory’s utility for explaining changes in authoritarian decision-making over time, but they also help to account for alternative explanations to the argument, such as the possibility that the Jordanian monarchy benefits from traditional legitimacy that protects its reputation from popular anger.

Chapter 2 provides a detailed account of the book’s theoretical arguments. It first expands on why blame is important for dictators, explaining how even the most powerful autocrats must be worried about a revolutionary uprising if enough citizens come to the conclusion that they are personally responsible for the country’s problems. Next, it outlines a theoretical framework of power sharing and blame in authoritarian regimes, defining the actors, their interests, and strategic interactions around blame and delegation of decision-making responsibilities. As autocrats become more concerned about threats from the public, they should be more incentivized to share power to shift blame, but they must also take into account the risks of delegating to elites who may try to challenge them from within the regime. The chapter then explains why monarchs are advantaged in using delegation to avoid blame, arguing that monarchs can share power more safely with other elites and that such delegation is more likely to align with the public’s expectations about how responsibility should be attributed for governance. The chapter concludes by outlining the key implications that will be tested in the subsequent empirical chapters.

Chapter 4 begins the detailed case study of Jordan. It first provides important background information on the country and reviews academic literature explaining the monarchy’s durability over the past century. It then draws on my elite interviews and other country-specific sources to explain how Jordan’s policymaking process functions. The chapter shows that the Jordanian king does grant meaningful decision-making influence to political elites in the cabinet and parliament, even though this delegation can result in policies that do not reflect the monarch’s preferences and can increase potential elite threats against the monarchy. The chapter also provides evidence that this delegation is intentionally used by the monarchs as a blame avoidance strategy. Interviews with senior decision-makers, including former chiefs of the royal court and prime ministers, reveal that the monarchy is aware that its reputation is likely to suffer if the king governs more directly and attracts more blame for the public’s grievances. This awareness is also reflected in how the Jordanian educational system teaches students about the decision-making process, and in the monarch’s willingness to share power more credibly for economic and social issues rather than foreign policy and security issues.

Chapter 10 concludes the book. After summarizing the main arguments and findings, the chapter reflects on the book’s implications for understanding the relationship between popular politics, elites, and institutions in authoritarian regimes. In doing so, the chapter also considers how the theory might apply to other types of authoritarian rule, focusing on its application to military regimes in particular. The chapter concludes by discussing how the theory can contribute to understanding democratic transitions, and by reflecting on the similarities and differences between authoritarian and democratic political systems.

Chapter 3 provides evidence from cross-national statistical analysis as well as two case studies that are consistent with the major implications of the theory. First, it draws on internet search data, survey data, and short case studies of Russia and Morocco to demonstrate that power-sharing arrangements affect how the public attributes blame under autocracy. The case studies also suggest that autocrats delegate strategically in response to shifting threats to their rule. Second, the chapter uses cross-national data from Varieties of Democracy to test my expectations about how strategic interactions around delegation and blame influence broader governance outcomes in autocracy. The analysis indicates that autocrats who share power more are less vulnerable to popular discontent, which is consistent with their ability to shift blame more effectively. The analysis also shows that autocrats who share power more are less likely to use repression and more likely to provide a measure of accountability by sacking ministers when the public becomes dissatisfied. These findings indicate that the book’s arguments provide insights into a range of modern authoritarian regimes around the world.

States in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region since independence have had limited experience with stable constitutional arrangements for decentralization of decision-making to regional or communal governments. Experiments from non-MENA countries provide models that might be borrowed to help hold together MENA’s culturally plural societies. These other countries have experimented with nonterritorial, homeland, subdivided homeland, and multiethnic jurisdictions. These constitutional arrangements vary in the powers they allocated to the subnational jurisdictions to select local leadership and make cultural and economic policies. The constitutional arrangements also vary in the guarantees against central intervention in the internal affairs of the sub-national jurisdictions. To make these arrangements more stable, these experiments have tried various provisions for limiting unilateral constitutional amendment, sharing rule in the central government, balancing different types of jurisdictions against one another, and subordinating the constitutional order to international guarantors.

This chapter opens by stating the main research question, namely whether power sharing reduces civil conflict or not. After briefly illustrating successful and unsuccessful cases of power sharing, we introduce our approach, which builds on a stream of work in conflict research stressing how exclusion of ethnic groups increased the risk of civil conflict. If this relationship is correct, one would expect the reverse to be true as well. That inclusion of ethnic groups through both territorial and governmental power sharing brings peace is indeed our working hypothesis. Still, there are good reasons to expect that this relationship may be more complicated. There are four main challenges that need to be addressed. First, it is essential not to lose sight of how power sharing is channeled through practices rather than merely being expressions of formal institutions. Second, analysts need to consider full samples rather than focusing only on cases that experienced conflict. Third, rather than being exogenously imposed, power sharing is usually enacted with an eye to future outcomes and is therefore profoundly endogenous to conflict. Finally, it is insufficient to analyze territorial power sharing without considering how pacific outcomes may hinge on whether this type of power sharing is being combined with governmental power sharing at the center. In fact, a failure to come to grips with these difficulties go a long way toward explaining why some researchers find no conflict-reducing effect, and sometimes even a conflict-increasing impact.

In Chapter 4 I discuss the theoretical definition of ‘political institutions’ sketched in Chapter 3, which sets them aside from the other institutions discussed in Chapter 3. Political institutions are norms and rules that transform a set of contradictory instigations to action into a single command; that discipline the struggle to achieve positions that can transform contradictory instigations into a command; that constrain the ruler’s search for generalised and stabilised behavioural compliance in any confined group; and that concern the procedure through which public powers produce private powers (as guaranteed rights), not the concrete outcomes of these procedures. I then distinguish different kinds of norms/rules: norms/rules of conduct versus norms/rules of recognition and norms/rules of conferral. It is argued that political institutions are norms/rules of conferral and are not rules of conduct or of recognition, and that confusion is generated when the types are mixed.

This chapter highlights key findings and proposes a path forward for the implementation of police integration in power sharing and post-conflict agreements. I identify several key lessons of police integration. In particular, it has the potential to provide societywide net benefits, making it a promising first step toward reconciliation where intergroup trust is especially low. When it comes to implementation, police integration is applicable to an unusually wide range of settings because unlike legislatures and cabinets, the police are no less effective in autocracies compared to democracies. I close by proposing a potential extension of my argument: Integration of other service-providing bureaucracies such as public education or healthcare may have similarly positive impacts on citizen–state relations by helping the government credibly signal its intentions to historically marginalized citizens.

This chapter begins with an overview of police integration worldwide. Nearly 40 percent of modern peace agreements include police reforms, and the makeup of the police rank and file is often central to these reforms. Yet, despite the police’s central role in peace-building, existing literature on power sharing pays little attention to this critical institution. I argue that in divided societies, the police rank-and-file’s unique combination of three characteristics – visibility, discretion, and capacity for violence – makes it especially influential in shaping citizen–state relations. The second half of the chapter details causal mechanisms linking police integration with citizens’ attitudes and expectations. For example, language differences between officers and citizens may make citizens feel less comfortable communicating with officers, or citizens may fear that cultural differences will prevent officers from understanding their situation. When the police are integrated at the patrol-level, officers can monitor their colleagues’ treatment of coethnic citizens and deter bad behavior.

The afterword focuses on the surprising connections of a century of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history to larger global developments outside of China, considering the potential future development of the Party, either towards more democratisation and power sharing, increasing focus on domestic challenges, or a new Marxist-Leninist world order with Beijing at it’s ideological center. The fate of international socialism is contrasted with the purges of both Stalin and Mao, which are shown to have led directly to the Sino-Soviet conflict from the late 1950s on. The lasting significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union for the CCP provides context for the increasingly close relationship between Xi and Putin, who share a mutual concern over Muslim separatism and demographic shifts within their countries. Connections are drawn between the more positive impacts of the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Belt and Road initiative, and darker history of global Maoism in Peru and Cambodia, with the latter spurring modernization following a successful Vietnamese intervention. The CCP’s long-standing difficulty of separating Party from ethnicity, particularly in its Southeast Asian allies, is contrasted with inspiration drawn from Japan and Korea in the post-Mao era and the legacy of falling regulation in global trade over the subsequent three decades. The afterword concludes with an exploration of the gradual end of China’s “peaceful rise” during the Xi era, touching on the daunting problems of a declining workforce, environmental degradation, and continuing wide income gaps which face the country’s leaders today, while also praising its pragmatic macroeconomic policies, impressive technological development, and openness to trade relative to the increasingly divided, insular, and unstable US under Trump.

This chapter explores power sharing as an institutional means of ending conflict. Power sharing is presumably able to address the credible commitment problem and accommodate societal diversity, thus improving the sustainability of peace deals. The chapter discusses two approaches to sharing power: autonomy (associated with efforts to manage diversity) and consociation (linked to attempts to overcome the credible commitment problem). The chapter then turns to concerns about the use of power sharing as a tool of peace-making. Critics of autonomy argue that autonomous institutions are the first step on the road to secession, whereas critics of consociationalism contend that, while it may secure peace, it prevents the achievement of democracy. The chapter concludes that, if it is to fulfil the promise of delivering peace and democracy, power sharing must be adapted to context, flexible enough to accommodate change and designed in such a way as to address its blinders and limitations.

The term conflict management stands for a wide array of activities undertaken to prevent violent conflicts, to manage and end them once broken out, as well as to build peace and to avoid a recurrence of violence. Such activities include mediation between warring factions, military and civilian peacekeeping operations to oversee truces or peace agreements, peace enforcement, and post-conflict reconstruction, which comprises initiatives for state-building and socio-economic development amongst others. This chapter scrutinizes these activities and identifies factors that lead to peace. Itconcentrates on mediation and power-sharing as means to make peace, on military and civilian operations of international organizations as means to keep peace, as well as on the accommodation of spoilers, the design of peace operations, and transitional justice as means to build peace.

One of the mechanisms by which power sharing contributes to the development of minimalist democracy, we argue, is by helping to distribute political power and resources more equitably across individuals and social groups. This chapter tests the existence of this relationship, which we refer to as involving the promotion of democracy from below. Our claim in this instance is that power-sharing institutions can help empower citizens and groups in ways that have the effect of enhancing their ability to participate in politics. This occurs as groups formerly excluded from politics are included in one or more domains of state power and as the distribution of resources enables individuals and groups, particularly those that were formerly marginalized, to take part in the political process.