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Consociational democracy is an electoral and civil arrangement that attempts to incorporate and share power throughout the various politically salient subgroups within a given society. Constitution writers and politicians in deeply divided countries such as Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, India, Lebanon, Malaysia, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Switzerland used consociational arrangements to deal with the fragmentation within their societies many years before scholarly interest in power-sharing democracies developed. Consociational arrangements were implemented as a means of addressing internal, enduring conflicts that had frequently erupted into violence. These cleavages often form along class, linguistic, religious, or race lines. For the states mentioned above, and other countries throughout the world, consociationalism represented an alternative to majority-rule democracy and a belief that pursuing policies of accommodation could best reduce the potential for conflict within a given society.

Consociational democracy rests on four principles: (1) grand coalition as a means of achieving broad representation in political decision making, particularly at the executive level; (2) segmental autonomy in matters of self-interest for the subgroups (e.g., schools and culture); (3) proportional representation in the legislature; and (4) veto rights for all subgroups on matters of substantial importance to the subgroup. Although the first modern researcher to use the term as it is understood today was the economist Sir Arthur Lewis (1965), Arend Lijphart and Gerhard Lehmbruch introduced consociational democracy to political science in 1967. Emphasizing the importance of institutional configurations, they broke with the dominant belief within the discipline that ethnic homogeneity was the most important element in societal stability. The early work of these scholars focused on the consociational practices of several smaller countries in Europe. To date, political science research on consociational democracy is still most readily associated with Lijphart.

Empirical Results

In Western Europe, the track record of consociational democracy has been largely successful (except perhaps in Belgium). Indeed, in several countries such as Austria, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg consociational arrangements proved so successful that the prominence of consociational democracy has receded as it has become less necessary to stem conflict. In other parts of the world, the record is mixed. While Colombian, Indian, Malaysian, and South African experiments with consociationalism can be seen as largely successful, Cyprus and Lebanon’s consociational systems each ended in civil war. After shifting from consociational or semiconsociational systems to more majoritarian patterns of governance, Uruguay in 1973 and Suriname in 1980 each became subject to martial rule. In the case of Lebanon, outside factors brought extraordinary pressure to bear on the consociational system that had worked rather well up to that point. In Uruguay and Suriname, each country’s movement toward majority rule complicates any attempt to point to consociationalism as having brought about failure.

A recent study concerning the ability of political institutions to promote state attachment in multiethnic societies has found that proportional electoral systems and federalism—each frequently a key component of consociational arrangements— have mixed effects, at best, as solutions to ethnic divisions. The mixed record of consociationalism outside of Europe raises the possibility that it works better in more developed countries than developing countries and that some combination of other factors such as literacy, strength of overall institutions, or level of development are a necessary precondition for deeply fissured societies to implement consociationalism properly.

Comparative research has uncovered several factors that facilitate the maintenance of consociational democracy. The two most important are the absence of a majority segment and the lack of large socioeconomic inequalities throughout the population. Other important factors include subgroups of roughly equal size, a small overall population size, foreign threats common to all subgroups, overarching loyalties to the state that counteract segmental loyalty, and preexisting traditions of consensus among elites.

Changing Identities Over Time

Critics fear that consociational arrangements carry a one-size fits-all approach or that they risk segmenting identities to a dangerous extent. Lijphart, however, in his 2004 article “Constitutional Design for Divided Societies,” points to substantial variation in the means employed by different countries in achieving the core principles of consociationalism, and the incorporation of recent constructivist scholarship focusing on questions of identity in comparative research has begun to address the concerns surrounding identity. The salient dimensions of identity are much more subject to change over time than previous generations of scholars had suspected, and this information is relevant to those who study consociational democracy as well. Lijphart, in a 2001 work “Constructivism and Consociational Theory,” suggests that his own ideas about the nature of ethnicity have changed over the span of his career, from a more primordial view to one more consistent with constructivism. His beliefs, however, were not changed so much by constructivist scholarship as by events on the ground in Lebanon and South Africa.

In Lebanon, the implementation of a consociational system that allocated political power along predetermined lines of cleavage, further calcified by a fixing of that proportion despite demographic change, proved highly unstable as Lebanese politics changed over time eventually ending in civil war. In South Africa, the intense and negative social engineering during apartheid made it very difficult and politically sensitive to predetermine the subgroups of society. Consociationalism implemented in such a way as to let the relevant groups self-select, and form of their own accord does not predetermine identity in a way that can form overly constraining permanent political cleavages, nor leaves a potential subgroup outside of power.

The Netherlands represents an example of consociationalism of the self-selecting variety. There, all groups receive equal public funding to establish schools of their own, provided certain standards are met. Further, a very low threshold was established for representation in the legislature, which again allows for political parties to form of their own accord. Self-selecting consociationalism represents a potentially important innovation in the theory as it relates to the integration of newcomers, an issue of increasing importance in the industrialized democracies of the world, because it does not arbitrarily fix the predicted identities of subgroups. Groups are still most likely to form along the conventional lines of expected cleavages, but consociationalism has now opened itself up to accommodating the potentially changing nature of these identities within a given society over time. This is consistent with constructivist research on the nature of identity and an important institutional design in attempts to integrate newcomers.

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