How much is political contestation?
Answers
Explanation:
negotiate the extent to which they can pursue their interests on the basis of their relative power and skill within the boundaries of what their constituencies tolerate. Interests can lie at any point on the ‘fully collective’ to ‘fully individual’ spectrum and are likely to vary across issue areas. The (in)formal agreement that results from these elite negotiations, it is argued, influences the type of institutions that can exist and the nature of their performance.[74] For example, an informal parameter of Iraq’s political settlement is that, whatever their differences, its main Shi’a parties unite when this is needed to retain their dominance over the central Iraqi state.[75] Among other things, this means that presumably ‘independent’ institutions, such as the Independent High Electoral Committee or the Commission for Accountability and Justice (in charge of de-Ba’athification), are likely to be independent only to the degree that their work is aligned with the dominating political logic. At present, there are two key problems associated with the application of the concept of political settlement in studies of conflict and fragility: