Power-sharing is a common institutional design prescribed for post-conflict societies throughout the world. Within the Middle East, Lebanese “consociationalism” is a longstanding example of such a system while Iraq developed de facto power-sharing arrangements in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion in 2003. The approach is now frequently invoked by scholars and policymakers alike as the primary or sole means of restoring peace and stability in Syria by providing the warring parties with a stake in the post-conflict political order and share of resources. As some studies have shown, however, power-sharing may be effective at “stopping the guns” but often falls short in promoting effective governance and, as a result, can lead to the frequent recurrence of conflict and even all-out war (Cammett and Malesky 2012, Roeder and Rothschild 2005). This paper builds on this research by tracing the effects of power-sharing in Lebanon on public goods provision, an outcome that has received scant attention in the power-sharing literature. The analyses focuses most explicitly on the health and education sectors, showing how the power-sharing system in place even before independence has incentivized high levels of spending and inefficiencies while leading to mediocre human development outcomes vis-à-vis countries at comparable levels of development. To show how these findings hold more generally, the case of Lebanon is then situated in a larger set of countries based on time series cross-sectional analyses of a global dataset of countries.