The disorderly universe of consociational democracy

Abstract

Since its initial presentation in the 1960s, Arend Lijphart's theory of consociational democracy has gained extensive attention in the social science literature. Unlike earlier political theories which suggest that subcultural segmentation precludes stable democracy, Lijphart's model posits the variable of coalescent elite behaviour to explain how divided states are able to achieve and maintain stable democracy. However, despite its application to numerous cases, the consociational model has not been deployed with much success. Controversy surrounds the designation of particular cases as consociational democracies. Furthermore, the proper scope of the consociational universe is subject to debate; virtually every case that can be located within the universe can also be argued out of it. This article suggests that the problem of the disorderly consociational universe lies within the construction of the theory of consociational democracy and not within the cases that theory has been used to describe. An examination of the constructs of the theory reveals that the inconsistencies exhibited by the cases are attributable to the faulty and imprecise concepts upon which consociational theory is based.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 120 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.