Stabilizing Without Integrating: Ethnopolitical Cartelization and Power-Sharing in Post-Ohrid Macedonia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the long-term effects of Macedonia’s post-conflict power-sharing arrangement, introduced by the Ohrid Framework Agreement (2001), on interethnic integration and democratic accountability. While the consociational model is widely credited with stabilizing the state and ensuring minority inclusion, it has also contributed to the institutional entrenchment of ethnic segmentation, shaping the incentives of political competition and governance. The article introduces the concept of ethnopolitical cartelization to describe how consociational power-sharing facilitates the consolidation of dominant ethnic parties as gatekeepers to state institutions, limiting intra-ethnic pluralism while preserving interethnic parity. Drawing on institutional analysis and empirical evidence, the article argues that key features of the Macedonian model, such as ethnic veto mechanisms, proportionality rules, and decentralized governance, have incentivized the monopolization of political representation within ethnic blocs, most clearly exemplified in the long-standing dominance of DUI within the Albanian political segment. This dynamic has enabled the development of vertically integrated party structures that channel access to state resources through identity-based patronage and informal governance. The result is a form of segmented stability in which public administration, education, and language policy operate through parallel structures. The Macedonian case illustrates the broader limitations of consociational design in deeply divided societies: while formal inclusion is achieved, it may come at the expense of shared civic space, horizontal accountability, and democratic responsiveness. By segmenting political authority and embedding elite brokerage into the structure of governance, the system inadvertently entrenches the very boundaries it was designed to overcome.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".