Introduction

In considering the various formal institutions that help or hinder interethnic cooperation after civil war, scholars often focus on national-level electoral, legislative, and executive structures. A lively debate considers the various benefits and drawbacks of different elec- toral systems (e.g., majoritarian vs. proportional representation), legislative arrangements (e.g., hard vs. soft guarantees for group representation); and executive designs (e.g., split vs. unitary) when implemented in post-conflict contexts (Rothchild and Roeder 2005; Cammett and Malesky 2012; McCulloch 2014; Hartzell and Hoddie 2020). In doing so, this research of- ten proceeds with the assumption that the formal institutions of the central state sufficiently explain the durability and degree of interethnic cooperation. In doing so, this memo argues that important local-level institutions and central-local relations that intervene in patterns of inter-ethnic cooperation are often overlooked.

Research concerning the role of local institutions after ethnic conflict often focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of local autonomy. Some scholars outline the benefits of decentralized or federal systems in the aftermath of ethnic conflict, suggesting that such arrangements allow for delegation of decision-making to local leaders of ethnic groups better suited to governing more homogeneous (or otherwise politically cohesive) sub-national units (Wolff 2009; Vandenberghe 2023). A large literature considers the effect of this sort of territorial decentralization on governance and peace durability, with mixed findings. Generally, this research shows that the devolution of authority to local institutions and elites requires a precarious balancing act, in which perceived ethnic divisions can either be accommodated or exacerbated – resulting in defection or resumption of violence in the most extreme cases.

In this memo, I consider these ideas with regard to the Lebanese case, then use that case to instantiate an inverse phenomenon: post-conflict states that strategically centralize power as a tool of ethnic conflict management. I argue that states may centralize authority vis-`a-vis local political institutions after episodes of interethnic conflict in a way that does positively incentivize buy-in from ethnic elites. Specifically, I argue that when control over local institutions is both centralized and jointly distributed between different ethnic elites, incentives for interethnic cooperation in the management of local governance increase. On the other hand, I argue and show that this type of interethnic cooperation gravitates toward collusion, i.e. cooperation specifically with the goal of excluding political competitors from power. I argue that interethnic collusion is a predictable consequence of state centralization in ethnic power-sharing contexts, and that this collusion has negative implications for the quality of electoral democracy. In doing so, I highlight a distinct tradeoff faced by post-conflict states when dividing power between central and local authorities.

As evidence, I draw on fieldwork and data collection conducted in Lebanon for my current book project between 2016 and 2019. In the remainder of the memo, I begin by overviewing how local legislative and electoral institutions in Lebanon differ from their counterparts at the national level. I consider how these institutional features might help or hinder interethnic cooperation in a counterfactual scenario in which power was significantly devolved to the local level. I conclude that this would likely not help, and might hinder interethnic relations. I then argue, that in the wake of a prolonged civil war (1975-90), centralization of authority (i.e., severe limits placed on local autonomy) was a key institutional adaptation in post-war Lebanon that incentivized ethnic elites, including former conflict participants, to cooperate. I describe how centralization induced interethnic cooperation in the local governance sphere, then show that this also coincided with the formation of systematic alliances between ethnic parties—within and across ethnic groups—in local electoral competition.

Local Political Institutions and Inter-Ethnic Cooperation

In this section, I overview key features of the local institutional landscape in Lebanon, then situate them within existing perspectives on interethnic cooperation and conflict. While political institutions at the national level in Lebanon are well-understood to operate based on a logic of rigid (i.e., corporatist) ethnic power-sharing, this is not the case with respect to local political institutions. Instead, two distinct features of local institutions – relative ethnic homogeneity and a total lack of legislative or electoral quotas – diverge radically from Lebanon’s national power-sharing model. I then briefly discuss how existing literature suggests that these two features—if local institutions were given substantial autonomous power – could imperil, and at best would likely not aid interethnic cooperation. By contrast, in the following section, I discuss how the post-war centralization of power over local governance did promote such cooperation.

Apart from its overall ethnic diversity, the “ethnic geography” of Lebanon on a national scale is quite diffuse. While segregation is commonplace at the neighborhood or municipal level—exacerbated by patterns of war-era internal displacement and ethnic cleansing—the country is not ethnically segregated at the district, governorate, or national level. In terms of national electoral competition, this means that in most districts, candidates form lists with other out-group candidates and compete for votes from ethnic out-groups. Once in office, almost all elites represent electoral districts comprising more than one ethnic group, some with no demographic plurality. While this feature of national competition is mediated by electoral institutions (Lebanon switched from a majoritarian to proportional representation system in 2017, for example), the need for interethnic cooperation and out-group support is a general feature of the national political landscape.

At the local (municipal) level, however, this diversity is comparatively much less prevalent. Lebanon contains approximately 1,200 municipalities, and it thus has one of the highest muncipality-to-citizen ratios in the world (Atallah 2015). The vast majority of these small political units are characterized by a clear ethnic majority, with some containing very few to no ethnic minority voters. Upon first glance, existing scholarship suggests that such comparatively homogeneous political units might function better. A somewhat robust finding in the comparative politics literature is that ethnic homogeneity is associated with better-quality governance and public goods provision and vice versa. Indeed, this was echoed in some of my interlocutors’ observations during my fieldwork: one councilor described to me an ethnically diverse municipality, split evenly between Sunni Muslims and Maronite Christians, as “effectively functioning as two different communities,” in which resentment over comparative access to governance goods at the neighborhood level festered.

On the other hand, we might suspect that smaller and more homogeneous municipal units have the potential to govern differently, but not necessarily better if given local autonomy. Scholars note that decentralized or federal arrangements often do not deliver on the promise of better governance quality because they fail to take advantage of economies of scale (Gross-man et al. 2017). Other scholars note, regardless of size and scale concerns, ethnically homogeneous local governments in the context of overall diverse states may come under the control of ethnic hardliners who promote ethnocentric, xenophobic, or otherwise antagonistic policies and attitudes (Brancati 2006). This observation also finds some empirical bearing in the Lebanese context: when given the autonomy to adopt independent policies toward (mostly Sunni Muslim) Syrian refugees, some municipalities without significant Muslim populations have chosen to enact discriminatory curfew policies and, in limited cases, violently expelled Syrians from their territory (Mourad 2017).

Another key distinction between Lebanese local and national institutions concerns provisions for legislative power-sharing. At the national level, each of Lebanon’s 128 seats in Parliament are pre-assigned to an ethnic group, and candidates campaign specifically for these ethnic seats. At the municipal level, however, no such quotas exist. Candidates campaign on a majoritarian basis under an open-list system. On the one hand, some literature arguing that ethnic power-sharing problematically reifies ethnic identity would suggest this system might promote electoral competition along non-ethnic lines, as candidates are no longer institutionally bound to an ethnic category (Kendhammer 2015; Nagle and Clancy 2019). On the other hand, this is rarely the case in the Lebanese context. Even explicitly non-ethnic (secular) electoral alliances formed in the latest municipal elections, held in 2016—such as Beirut Madinati (“Beirut is My City”) – formed lists that adhered to an informal ethnic quota roughly proportional to local demographics (in Beirut, half Christian and half Muslim). I found that this practice of candidate adherence to an informal quota was widespread in these local elections and prior ones, suggesting that lack of formal quotas does not independently mitigate the political significance of ethnic identity.

More concerningly, the lack of legislative quotas in local institutions contains the potential to alienate ethnic minorities. Many interlocutors noted to me that in more competitive electoral races, due to the majoritarian system, the total list of winning candidates often ultimately excludes ethnic minorities. This was the case, for example, in the 2016 elections in Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city, where a slate of 24 Muslim candidates were elected despite the city’s significant Christian minority and the winning lists’ adherence to the in- formal quota. This caused considerable alarm among the city’s Christian population and prompted the resignation of one of its Christian MPs. Absent informal checks on this system of unfettered majoritarianism, therefore, it appears that Lebanese local electoral institutions have the potential to produce ethnically exclusionary outcomes that inhibit interethnic cooperation.

In summary, I have tried to show here Lebanon’s local institutional landscape—evaluated independently of the broader national context or center-local relations—is not effectively designed to promote interethnic cooperation. While ethnic homogeneity might promote better inter-elite coordination on a local scale, it is not clear whether this would override other concerns regarding the tendency of ethnic autonomy to promote patterns of othering and exclusion. For the Lebanese case and others with similar local institutional configurations, this section has thus described the perils of local autonomy. In the next section, I describe those associated with the opposite dynamic: increased state centralization.

Local Institutions and State Centralization After Ethnic Conflict

During the Lebanese civil war, local political institutions were effectively untethered from the central state and left to self-govern—or fall apart. Local elections were not held between 1963 and 1998; as a result, many councilors resigned, passed away, or emigrated. I found that a variety of councils in larger cities were re-formed on an ad hoc basis midway through the war, with the endorsement of key local elites, in order to maintain basic order and delivery of services. This process evolved and accelerated by the mid-1980s as several ethnic militias formed during the war gained control over and autonomously governed significant swaths of territory (Picard 2000).

In my research, I found that these militias and other war-era political entrepreneurs forged close ties with municipal institutions in the process of developing robust governance structures. In the city of Tyre, located in South Lebanon, for example, the (ethnically Shia Muslim) Amal Movement established a committee that partnered with and donated money to the city’s municipal council in order to repair local infrastructure following the 1982 Israeli invasion. I found through interviews with elites across multiple Lebanese municipalities that ties such as these, forged between new ethnic elites and municipalities, also emerged other parts of the country associated with Sunni Muslim, Christian, and Druze elites. In summary, municipalities briefly became autonomous from the central state and were instead independently sponsored by key conflict participants.

After the civil war came to an end in 1989 through a national-level settlement, the local sphere remained unsettled. The Taif Agreement, which ended the Lebanese civil war, formally specifies decentralization as a core principle of post-war policymaking. Policies de- limiting the balance of power between central and local authority, however, have adhered to a logic of reversion to and even strengthening of state centralization. This system has been described by scholars of Lebanese politics as one of “deconcentrated authority,” in which municipal institutions are legally given responsibility for a wide variety of basic governance duties, ranging from waste management to infrastructural maintenance, while being denied the fiscal and bureaucratic resources necessary to independently fulfill those tasks (Harb and Atallah 2015).

Instead, I found in my research a system of highly centralized authority: local governments are legally restricted in the types of taxation they can enact, and most municipalities are largely funded by the central government. Even for municipalities that can raise significant internal revenue, however, permission to spend above a low threshold must legally be given by the central government, and often requires the approval of multiple ministerial bodies, each affiliated with a different (ethnic) national party. The resulting system is one in which national ethnic elites jointly control the provision of local governance goods—and, per national power-sharing institutions, hold mutual veto power over one another’s ability to do so.

In this context, it is of course possible that national ethnic elites might simply choose not to cooperate over the local institutional sphere. This might (and does, occasionally) take the form of ministers from different ethnic parties refusing to sign off on services in municipalities under one another’s control. Yet this type of interethnic gridlock would leave all participants worse off than the alternative of interethnic cooperation – which, my research found, is the modal strategy pursued in relation to local governance. Further still, I found that this interethnic coordination over local affairs expanded, during Lebanon’s early post-war era, to encompass not just cooperation on governance, but also collusion in local elections. After conducting a survey of mayors across all of Lebanon’s municipalities, I was surprised to find that national ethnic parties almost never competed against each other, within or across ethnic groups, in local elections (see Figure 1). Even in the largest (i.e. urban) municipalities, I found that national ethnic parties only competed against one another in ten percent of municipal races. Across all municipalities, I found that ethnic parties allied in over 85 percent of the races in which they selected into competition.

I also examined patterns of ethnic party (non)-competition at the local level by party dyad (see Figure 2). Looking at the six largest ethnic parties, which collectively dominated the national legislature and executive branches at the time of the last local elections, most parties allied with one another in the vast majority of places where they ran. Amal Movement and Hezbollah, for example—both parties representing the same ethnic constituency—allied in 98 percent of races where they ran together. In my research, I found that many of these intra-ethnic alliances were supported by formal party “non-compete agreements”, such as one formed between Amal and Hezbollah in 2004, and another formed between the two largest (and ideologically opposed) Christian parties, the Lebanese Forces and Free Patriotic Movement, in 2016. In only one case did a party dyad ally in less than half of the races where they ran.

Data comes from a survey of Lebanese mayors conducted shortly after the May 2016 elections, in partnership with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. Mayors were contacted using publicly available cellphone data. Answers were verified by follow-up phone calls to other municipal councilors and media coverage of the municipality where available. Data pertains to the six largest national parties in Lebanon, all ethnic, measured in terms of national political representation.

Data comes from a survey of Lebanese mayors conducted shortly after the May 2016 elections, in partnership with the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies. Mayors were contacted using publicly available cellphone data. Answers were verified by follow-up phone calls to other municipal councilors and media coverage of the municipality where available. Full party names and ethnic affiliations are as follows: Future Movement (Future), Sunni Muslim; Lebanese Forces (LF), Christian; Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), Christian; Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), Druze; Amal Movement (Amal), Shia Muslim; Hezbollah, Shia Muslim. Alliance rates are calculated for municipalities where both parties in any given dyad are selected to run.

In my research, I characterize this type of party behavior in local elections as interethnic “collusion” or “cartelization.” I do so with the understanding that these alliances are not aimed exclusively at facilitating interethnic cooperation per se, but more broadly at preventing new political entrants – ethnic or otherwise – from gaining electoral power. As much of my book project discusses, this type of interethnic collusion in post-war Lebanon has been very effective at dissuading new political entry at the local level and, where it does emerge, disabling local electoral oppositions’ ability to effectively govern. In other words, Lebanon’s local institutional landscape has helped to produce a very rigorous but, in key respects, exclusionary form of interethnic cooperation.

Conclusion: State Centralization and the Pitfalls of Cooperation

In this memo, I have aimed to outline the distinct dilemmas associated with the negotiation between central and local power in ethnically diverse, post-conflict states. In the Lebanese case, I show that authority was further centralized at the end of the country’s civil war, wresting autonomous control over local governance away from the key protagonists of conflict and forcing those protagonists to jointly control the local sphere. I show that this arguably worked too well – ethnic elites came not only to jointly control governance, but to collude in the expansion of their electoral control.  That said, I also show that decentralized or federal arrangements in the Lebanese context, like many others, are likely not panaceas for predatory national elite behavior or poor governance quality. Instead, I show that both arrangements contain inverse perils and promises, with centralization facilitating some form of interethnic cooperation in the everyday governance sphere, albeit one that impedes democratic accountability in the process.