Conflicting Objectives in Democracy Promotion: Do All Good Things Go Together? by Julia Leininger & Sonja Grimm & Tina Freyburg

Author:Julia Leininger & Sonja Grimm & Tina Freyburg [Leininger, Julia & Grimm, Sonja & Freyburg, Tina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy
ISBN: 9780415825900
Google: XrIHlgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 17803518
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-03T00:00:00+00:00

Source: The World Value Surveys 2001.

Notes: Entries in each cell are the frequency, row percentage, and column percentage of total respondents, in that order. The χ-square statistic is 551.45 and is significant at the 0.001 level.

The World Values Surveys were conducted in BiH in 2001, when the Alliance for Change was in power and public dissatisfaction with its tepid political and economic reforms was on the rise. Respondents were asked, ‘If there were a national election tomorrow, for which party on this list would you vote?’ One clear result from Table 2 is that the three ethno-nationalist parties obtained zero support from respondents of other ethnic groups: all SDA supporters were Bosniaks, all HDZ supporters were Bosnian Croats, and all SDS supporters were Bosnian Serbs. Another way to detect tendencies toward moderation of ethnic voting is to investigate whether the supposedly multiethnic party, SDP, garnered significant support across different ethnic groups. However, the descriptive statistics in Table 2 show that almost 80% of SDP supporters were Bosniaks. This suggests that ethnic divisions are deeply entrenched, not only in BiH’s party politics but also in the hearts and minds of ordinary people.45

What about public support for post-war political institutions? Table 3 presents data on public confidence in the key domestic and international institutions that have been created by or been involved in peace-building operations in BiH. The World Values Surveys asked Bosnian respondents: ‘I am going to name a number of organizations. For each one, could you tell me how much confidence you have in them: is it a great deal of confidence, quite a lot of confidence, not very much confidence or none at all?’ Entries in Table 3 are the percentages of respondents who had ‘a great deal of’ or ‘quite a lot of’ confidence in each institution. Clearly, a large majority of Bosnian people did not have confidence in the central government and parliament, but placed relatively higher trust in the police, an institution that had been established separately in each entity after the Dayton Accords. Ethnicity plays a certain role here as well: Bosniaks had a higher level of confidence in the central state institutions than did Bosnian Croats and Serbs. This ethnic difference makes sense in consideration of the fact that the Bosniaks essentially obtained most of what they had wanted through the peace negotiations leading up to Dayton, in comparison to the other two ethnic groups. Moreover, a much larger ethnic distinction can be found in public confidence in international institutions: while a majority of Bosniak respondents felt confident in NATO and the UN, only 13% and 17% of Bosnian Serbs trusted these two international institutions, respectively.

Table 3. Institutional confidence in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Bosniaks Croats Serbs

Government 34.69% (588) 20.77% (183) 25.05% (393)

Parliament 23.41% (581) 17.59% (182) 16.45% (389)

Police 70.50% (590) 62.84% (183) 53.55% (394)

EU 57.07% (573) 53.55% (183) 32.04% (387)

NATO 52.88% (573) 44.81% (183) 12.95% (386)

UN 51.30% (573) 46.16% (182) 17.27% (388)

Source: The World Value Surveys 2001.

Notes: Entries represent the percentage of respondents who expressed confidence in each institution, with the number of total respondents in parentheses.

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