Review and Critique of the Literature on Consociational Democracy

Abstract

It has always been rather assumed that socio-cultural homogeneity and majoritarian consensus are the main pillars upon which democracy could develop and consolidate its foundations. Yet, in the 1960s, political scientists strongly challenged these views and elaborated comparable types that helped explain stability in fragmented cultures. There was a growing concern that classical Western-style models with their relatively stable party-systems and coalitions have proven to be inapplicable to a specific category of societies which lacked homogeneity. Thus, pluralistic and segmented societies characterized by economic, religious, social, and ideological cleavages have persistently escaped the theoretical frame of familiar typologies. Furthermore, the Western model of democracy was unable to account for the record of stability in the smaller European countries which enjoyed considerable equilibrium despite their segmentation. In Almond’s analysis, for example, these societies were seen as oscillating between the “Anglo-American type” and the “continental European System,” yet they were never assigned a category of their own.