Power Sharing

Power sharing results when governments or civil society actors elicit cooperation in actions undertaken by one another. Power sharing also results from passive acquiescence in such undertakings. More extensive in representative democracies, power sharing also occurs in other governmental systems. Also, democratic transitions are marked by increased power sharing—planned and unplanned.

The diversity of social organization often prevents otherwise dominant official governments from monopolizing governance. Resources available to national and local governments may not suffice to carry out tasks expected of them. Thus, power sharing complements and modifies useful insights from power elite, social class, and interest group pluralist theories. For explaining decision making in presidential systems, power sharing is a more nuanced alternative to checks and balances.

Power sharing manifests itself in the day-to-day bureaucratic politics in and between government departments. In nonelectoral activity, power sharing occurs almost continuously between governments and well-positioned individuals and organizations. Official governments may also be understood as larger, more powerful interest associations. One of many among plural centers of power, official government agencies and departments compete and negotiate with business and trade associations, veterans' organizations, educational groups, news media, and antiwar movements to get their business done. From the perspective of political actors, therefore, power sharing occurs both willingly and unwillingly, skillfully and ineffectively.

Policy narratives answer the questions of where, when, and how skillfully power is shared. The details of these case studies can explain why government officials or civil society organizations succeeded or failed to achieve their preferred futures. Top-down consultation with individuals and nongovernmental or civil society organizations is one kind of power sharing. Inclusion of minority political parties in the cabinet of national governments is another. The quality of power sharing also explains how small, seemingly weak social movements sometimes prevail dramatically in achieving policy objectives, despite opposition from large and powerful established governments.

Intragovernmental power sharing in federal systems is premised on domestic division of sovereignty. Within federal and unitary states, regional autonomy for indigenous people is further power sharing. It also occurs between national or local governments of two or more countries, for example, with international treaties between independent states. More broadly, growing collaboration in the European Union, and the Association of South East Asian Nations implies power sharing and unacknowledged surrender of a degree of sovereignty. Power sharing between government agencies of one country and people and organizations in another has become an increasingly common form of crossnational pressure politics and lobbying. Trade negotiations between the United States and Japan in the 1980s and 1990s are a good example of this.

Among other implications of power sharing, representative democracies co-opt protest activities more efficiently than do authoritarian systems. But whether lobbying, educational, and protest activities designed to elicit power sharing from official governments by civil society associations are more [Page 741]effective in parliamentary or presidential systems is debated.