Nearly all contemporary conflicts are driven in part by political marginalization.This political marginalization amplifies the consequences of economic and cultural marginalization. To craft a durable peace, the parties to peace negotiations often spend considerable time and effort crafting power-sharing arrangements that balance the pull of some parties for greater diffusion and devolution of political power with the pull of other parties to maintain a degree of political centralization, for the sake of efficiency and effectiveness, and to preserve their prior political privileges. This chapter explores the puzzle of whether and how to create a vertical power-sharing arrangement that leads to a durable peace. It reviews the peace processes related to conflicts in Bosnia, Colombia, Indonesia/Aceh, Iraq, Macedonia, Nepal, the Philippines/Mindanao, South Africa, Sudan, and Yemen to understand how parties have grappled with the thorny set of conundrums, including the choice of state structure; the allocation of legislative and executive powers among the levels of government; the degree of political, administrative, and/or fiscal decision-making authority to be devolved; and the timeline for implementing any agreed plan for decentralization.

This chapter expands on my dramaturgical theoretical framework by laying out the different credibility imperatives that are predicted to confront politicians and statisticians in government statistical systems. I suggest that politicians’ needs for data to support their policy agendas, the political imperative of creating an impression of government competence, and the pressure to depoliticise statistics are all likely to shape political decisions about delegating authority to statisticians. I then explore the credibility imperatives confronting government statisticians and note that they can be predicted to emphasise the complexity of their work, as well as their competence and neutrality. They also face an imperative to illustrate the policy usefulness of their statistics. Finally, I elaborate on the role that institutions play in creating settings for the dramatic performances of politicians and statisticians. I explain how state structures, state cultures and administrative traditions are theoretically predicted to influence the credibility of different performances.