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9 oktober 2019
Arend Lijphart is a political scientist. Central in his work is the distinction between majoritarian democracy (MD) and consociational democracy (CD). To be clear : in both kinds of democracy a majority is required but in a CD the ambition is to have more than a majority; The ambition is to have all important “segments” of society included in the government. According to Lijphart “elite cooperation is the primary distinguishing feature of consociational democracy” (Democracy in Plural Societies ; 1977 ; page 1). In his 1977 book Lijphart starts by referring to what he calls a well established proposition in political science, namely “that it is difficult to achieve and maintain stable democratic government in a plural society” before making his key point that the application of CD makes it “not at all impossible to achieve and maintain stable democratic government in a plural society.” In a well functioning CD “the cooperative attitudes and behaviour of the leaders of the different segments of the population” counteract the “centrifugal tendencies inherent in a plural society”.
In his 1984/1999 book “Patterns of Democracy” Lijphart details further the political structure of 21 countries (in 1977) and 36 countries (in 1984) in terms of consociational versus majoritarian. Further he investigates the “efficiency” of the two regimes and concludes that (1) majoritarian democracies are clearly not superior to consensus democracies in providing good governance, managing the economy, and maintaining civil peace; (2) Consensus democracies “have a better performance record than majoritarian democracies, especially when performance is measured by the five Worldwide Governance Indicators and the ICRG domestic conflict risk assessment and also with regard to inflation.” (p. 273)
Lijphart’s work is of interest to us because
(1) his core theme is the difficulty of the plural society ;
(2) the solution he sees in Consensus Democracy (which I would consider under certain circumstances as an overruling of democracy);
(3) he wrote his books over a long range of time (1977 – 1984 – 1999) and it is interesting to see how the political contexts have changed over that period ;
(4) it is further interesting to see how the viewpoints of Lijphart changed as a consequence of the changes of the facts on the ground over that long period of time.
As mentioned before, in his 1999 book Lijphart analyses 36 different democracies. He splits them in three different groups : plural societies, semiplural societies and nonplural societies. Evidently, it might be an inspiration for an interesting debate how such a taxonomy was achieved. This is how Lijphart distributes the countries over the three groups :
Plural Societies : India, Spain, Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Israel, Trinidad, Mauritius.
Semiplural Societies : United States, Germany, France, Italy, Korea, Netherlands, Austria, Finland, Luxembourg.
Nonplural Societies : Japan, United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Costa Rica, Ireland, New Zealand, Uruguay, Jamaica, Botswana, Malta, Bahamas, Iceland, Barbados.