Ethnofederalism and Other Institutional Forms of Managing Ethnic Problems

The merits or otherwise of ethnofederalism as an institutional approach to the management of ethnically divided societies continues to animate scholarly debate.  For some, ethnofederalism is a potentially workable compromise between the demands of territorially concentrated ethnic groups for independence and the desire of a common state to preserve its territorial integrity; for critics, it is a short-cut to secession and state collapse.  This paper draws on the universe of post-1945 ethnofederal arrangements, both failures and successes, to subject these rival claims to empirical scrutiny.  It relies on the logic of a natural “same-systems” comparative design to answer two questions – are ethnofederal arrangements more likely to succeed than fail?; and, are there plausible alternative institutions that could have succeeded in cases of ethnofederal failure? The results indicate that, within this universe of cases, etnofederalism succeeds more often that it fails, and that where ethnofederal systems fail, they generally fail where no institutional alternatives could plausibly have succeeded.