Consociational Theory Research Articles

CIVIL SOCIETY IN CONFLICT REGULATION: CYPRUS CASE

As a conflict regulation method, consociationalism offers stability and peace, though short-term and negative, for deeply divided societies. However, the success of consociationalism is highly doubted due to lacking long-term peace and durability. Establishment and continuation of consociational regimes mostly depend on external pressure. When the pressure vanishes, majorities tend to shift to majoritarian system or for worse, conflict can resume. This paper argues that, being only dependent on elite cooperation and on the back-up of international actors is not adequate and creates a weakness in the approach. To overcome this, domestic actors, most importantly civil societal actors, should be empowered and incorporated in the establishment of a long-term positive peace, in order the consociational system to be sustainable. Through civil society cooperation and projects, popular adoption of the system and improvement of communal relations can be realized. This argument is tested on a protracted conflict, Cyprus which has experienced power-sharing with external pressure and is still discussing it as a future solution, through evaluating the impacts of bicommunal NGO projects and outcomes of civil society initiatives. By utilizing conclusions from the case, this paper offers contribution to both procedures of consociational theory and conflict regulation in other multiethnic states.

The Use and Abuse of Veto Rights in Power-Sharing Systems: Northern Ireland’s Petition of Concern in Comparative Perspective

This article assesses the articulation of vital ethno-national interests and the use and abuse of veto rights in deeply divided societies. In consociational theory, veto rights represent the primary means by which ethnic groups defend their ‘vital interests’, though they are often criticized for rewarding extremism and producing institutional instability. Situating a case study of Northern Ireland in a comparative perspective, I consider two lines of veto practice: liberal vs corporate (i.e. who has veto rights?) and permissive vs restrictive (i.e. to what issue areas do vetoes apply?), to assess what political incentives, if any, they offer for moderation and stability. Drawing from a review of the legislative debates when a veto was enacted and on semi-structured interviews with members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, I argue that a permissive approach, in which groups can determine their own vital interests, can contribute to moderation, peace and stability in divided societies.

Consociationalism and Identity in Ethnically Divided Societies: Northern Ireland and Malaysia

AbstractThis article tests the hypothesis that ethnic identities in divided societies lose their significance after the implementation of consociational power‐sharing arrangements. It analyses and compares the cases of Northern Ireland and Malaysia, as both have a substantially different experience of liberal consociationalism. In Northern Ireland, power sharing is strictly enforced through the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement of 1998, whilst in Malaysia it is exercised more informally within the Barisan Nasional coalition, which has governed the state since independence in 1957. Malaysia, therefore, has a considerably longer history of consociationalism than Northern Ireland. It is thought that if a mitigation of the salience of ethnic identities is taking place, ethnic political parties would become less prevalent. This article argues that these parties remain highly significant and, therefore, a shared identity is not being realized in either case. This conclusion does not, however, demonstrate a shortcoming of consociational theory but instead shows that managing conflict in divided societies is not the same as removing it altogether.

Beyond Consociational Theory: Identity in Northern Ireland and Brussels

This article analyzes the potential for consociational power sharing to pave the way for the formation of a shared identity in divided societies. It compares consociational arrangements in Northern Ireland and Brussels and argues that if this is achievable it will be demonstrated in the more liberal case of the former, rather than the corporate case of the latter. In concluding that greater intergroup engagement is occurring in Brussels than in Northern Ireland, this article challenges the ability of consociationalism to mitigate identities and looks to other factors to explain this finding.

Macedonia after the 2001 conflict: towards social cohesion and reconciliation?

The paper aims to contribute to the on-going debate in the literature about reconciliation after an armed conflict through presentation of the Macedonian experience. It focuses upon the following questions: Is the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA), which put an end to the armed conflict in the country, supported by the process of reconciliation? Has the state found the right way to deal with the past? In order to answer the questions, the paper describes briefly the Agreement and the process of its implementation. In this context, it identifies the type of power-sharing system established by the OFA through analysis of the Agreement within the integrative and consociational theory. Then, the paper examines how the state dealt with the past. Further, it discusses the impact of the amnesty for grave crimes on reconciliation in the country using the existing literature. The paper argues that it is questionable whether the state chose the best approach to dealing with the past.

Party, Regional and Linguistic Proportionality Under Majoritarian Rules: Swiss Federal Council Elections

AbstractThe elections to the Swiss Federal Council in December 2015 re‐established a system of party‐centred concordance, cherished in consociational theory, consisting of two representatives of the Swiss People's Party, two Radicals, two Social Democrats and one Christian Democrat. At the same time, the government has rarely been as unbalanced in terms of the representation of Switzerland's languages and regions. The article analyses the concept of concordance with regard to both aspects of governmental inclusiveness. It also highlights the crucial role of electoral rules used in governmental elections. It argues that they resemble the Alternative Vote, a majoritarian electoral system that has been criticized in consociational theory but prescribed by the rival, centripetalist approach to power sharing.

Reforming Belgium’s Federalism: Comparing the Views of MPs and Voters

Consociational theory posits that political elites in divided societies will show a stronger ‘spirit of accommodation’ than the groups they represent, and that this prudent leadership on behalf of the elites explains why divided societies hold together. Belgium has long been considered to be one of the best examples of such a consociational democracy. Yet in this country the spirit of accommodation of prudent leaders was questioned and discussed publicly during the 2010–11 political gridlock. The question is therefore whether Belgian political elites are indeed less radical and hold less extreme views than voters, as suggested by consociational theory. To explore this question, this article relies on survey data gathered during the historically long government negotiations of 2010–11 between members of all six Belgian assemblies. This original data set on MPs is compared with data on voters gathered in 2009 and 2014 in order to contrast their views on the reform of Belgium’s federalism. The results show that voters are less radical than MPs on this question, but the data also reveal that MPs are strongly divided within communities and also within party. Neither communities nor parties are monolithic blocks.

Power-sharing in a re-united Cyprus: Centripetal coalitions vs. proportional sequential coalitions

Power-sharing coalitions in severely divided places can take centripetal or consociational forms. Respectively, these aim to foster moderation by restricting coalitions to moderate parties from different ethnic communities or inclusivity by ensuring that coalitions are broadly and proportionately representative of the main political forces. This article draws on the experience of Cyprus to show the limits of negotiating centripetal coalitions even under “most likely to succeed” conditions. It investigates a major centripetalist initiative on the island between 2008 and 2010, and explains why this failed to catalyze a negotiated settlement. Likewise, the article points to the limits of classic consociational approaches in mediating power-sharing arrangements, particularly approaches that rely on corporate ethnic quotas. Contrary to conventional wisdom and much international practice, the article shows that consociational coalitions can take a liberal form that bypass such quotas. Specifically, the article presents and defends an important innovation in consociational theory and practice: the proportional sequential (PS) coalition. PS coalitions are automatically determined by election results, and allocate portfolios on a proportionate and liberal basis amongst a divided polity’s main political parties. We argue that PS coalitions can provide a broadly inclusive and negotiable settlement in the context of a re-united Cyprus as well as in other divided polities.

Pragmatists versus dogmatists: Explaining the failure of power-sharing in Northern Ireland during the 1970s

This article argues that the failure of Northern Ireland’s first power-sharing executive, and subsequent attempts to restore power-sharing during the 1970s, was the result of conflicting attitudes towards devolution among Northern Ireland’s politicians. Traditional ideological divisions between nationalists and unionists were not the primary barrier to creating and sustaining cross-community institutions, as stressed in accounts of this period premised on consociational theory. Drawing extensively from archival sources, it argues that the split between the pragmatists from both communities, who were prepared to compromise their core principles and accept power-sharing devolution within a UK framework, and the dogmatists (both nationalists and unionists) who refused to contemplate any compromise to their core position, prevented a consensual political settlement emerging during the 1970s.

Sectarian dynamics of multicultural norms and the law in Lebanon: warning for the future of Northern Ireland

The aim of this article is to show how the institutionalised multicultural political arrangements in Lebanon may have provided for a certain period a degree of local harmony and related toleration when national demographics were relatively stable (or demographic growth was somehow similar within groups or harmony was somehow imposed) but it has not been a force for the same once demographic change has (dramatically) occurred, since it automatically undermined the basis on which any agreement was founded. In addition, whatever harmony it does produce at the national level is not reciprocated at the local level. Indeed multiculturalism may well be a defining feature in the implosion of the Lebanon as a nation state. The reason for this is that any polity to be stable must be inclusive enough at the level of imagined community to encompass change without it being felt as loss by significant groups within the nation state. The institutionalised segregation that the multicultural settlement created in Lebanon does not provide for this inclusiveness since it is predicated on coalitions of exclusive groups (17 religious groups have a political representation in the Parliament) that (often) do not mix or share an imagined community (and, if they do, it is for short-term goals, such as recent coalitions predicated on inter-religious lines, i.e. the anti-Syrian 14 March Alliance) and hence any change is seen not as an inclusive experience to the whole but as exclusive and therefore (in the medium term) as a threat. This creates (long term) inbuilt instability and a permanently failing state. Building on a critique to multiculturalism and consociational theory (at least with reference to power-sharing) we further hypothesise that this situation may well be replicated in Northern Ireland since though in a less fragmented, however more radical separation, it appears to be following a similar trajectory.

Power Shift or Paradigm Shift? China's Rise and Asia's Emerging Security Order

This essay proposes a new theoretical framework for analyzing the rise of China and its impact on Asian security order. While the rise of China is reshaping Asia's military balance, the region has also witnessed equally important and longer-term changes, especially economic interdependence, multilateral institutions and domestic politics. The implications of these changes are not fully accounted for by the different types of security orders proposed by analysts to describe the implications of China's rise, such as anarchy, hierarchy, hegemony, concert, and community. This essay presents an alternative conceptualization of Asian security order, termed consociational security order (CSO) that draws from different theoretical lenses: defensive realism, institutionalism, and especially consociational theory in comparative politics. Specifying the conditions that make a CSO stable or unstable, the essay then examines the extent to which these conditions can be found in Asia today. Aside from offering a distinctive framework for analyzing China's rise, the CSO framework also offers an analytic device for policymakers and analysts in judging trends and directions in Asian security.

Elite behaviour and elite communication in a divided society

Consociational democracy theory attributes an important role to the subgroup elites. They have to build the bridges between the subgroups and govern together in a divided and segmented society. This need for an accommodating elite has been criticized — among others — for its unrealistic expectations. A compromising attitude can hardly be expected when the subgroup leaders need to remain acceptable and legitimate among their rank and file. Post-electoral guarantees for power sharing are not enough to ensure real and functioning power sharing. In this article we focus on Belgium — a textbook example of consociational democracy — and more in particular on the difficult post-election period of 2007. We analyze newspaper interviews with both moderate and radical Belgian political leaders and illustrate how their discourse is torn between loyalty to the rank and file and the necessity of consociational power sharing. A combination of critical discourse and framing analysis shows how this representation is built up linguistically through an interplay of names used to describe oneself, the specific use of the pronouns of the first person plural and consistent metaphors.

Electoral Systems and the Contest for Relative Group Status in Post-Conflict Societies: The Case of the 2009 Election in South Africa

Empirical support appears to be growing for the claimed effectiveness of proportional electoral systems in contributing to lasting peace in post-conflict societies. We raise two objections against this claim. Firstly, we argue that the theoretical rationale for this causal effect, as presented in consociational theory, is inadequate, in lacking a psychological mechanism for moderation. We argue that the capacity of constitutional arrangements to deliver parity of esteem amongst competing political groups should be added as a criterion for evaluating the effectiveness of constitutional rules in maintaining political stability. Secondly, we challenge the empirical claim that South Africa should be considered as an example which supports the argument for Party-list Proportional Representation (PR) as a conflict-regulating rule. Using data from the 2009 general election in South Africa to illustrate the nature of the engagement between ruling and opposition parties, we find that despite the entrenchment of the proportional electoral system, there is a disparity of esteem in political relationships. This necessitates a reconsideration of the purported value of PR as a conflict-regulating constitutional device.

Is Consociational Theory the Answer to Global Conflict? From the Netherlands to Northern Ireland and Iraq

Neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists subscribe to the idealistic belief that external powers can successfully re-engineer states into Western capitalist democracies. Consociationalism is a prominent or even dominant theory for managing conflict in ‘ethnonationally divided societies’. The consociational model is based on the Dutch experience of managing ‘plural conflict’ from 1917 to 1967. This article argues that consociationalism has become increasingly vague, ambiguous and even contradictory as the theory has been stretched in an attempt to claim relevance to both the Northern Ireland and Iraq conflicts. Although this has eroded the coherence of the consociational theory this is more than compensated for by the flexibility this gives consociationalists in marketing their concept as all things to all people. By contrast post-structuralist radical democrats are critical of the reductionism of consociational theorising and emphasise the limits of human reason to grasp adequately the complexity of diverse conflict situations.

Constitutional Design for Divided Societies. Integration or Accommodation?

AbstractConstitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation? raises important conceptual questions of consociational theory and powersharing mechanisms and tests them against a wide range of regional case studies from Europe, Africa and Asia. The axiomatic, underlying interest for analysis is the question: how can and should culturally divided societies be politically managed, not the least through constitutional arrangements? All of the articles are based on the conceptual distinction of “integration” versus “accomodation” as a follow-up to the Lijphart-Horowitz debate. However, the main achievement of the book is the insight into the necessity to de-construct this conceptual dichotomy and to develop better refinements by bridging the gap between comparative politics and comparative constitutional law. In the end the book thus provides fresh food for thought on how to reconcile consociational theory and powersharing mechanisms with the problems of self-determination disputes usually overlooked by the former concepts.

Consociational Theory and Conflict Management

Consociational Theory and Conflict Management

The Consociational Democracy at Stake: Four Approaches to Explain Lebanon Past and Present

Lebanon's history of democratic establishment, collapse and resuscitation represents an excellent laboratory to assess the theory of Consociational Democracy. This article elaborates four main approaches — Elitist, Institutional, Developmental and International — that emerged in the literature concerning Lebanon since the mid-1960s. It is aimed to demonstrate their complete interdependence in contributing to Consociational Democracy theory, despite the fact that each of these approaches purposes to give unique explanation of the Lebanese political system. Thus, the explanatory variables — elites, institutions, modernization and international environment — of Lebanon's cycles of reforms and collapses are empirically analyzed in view of the authors who proposed them. Finally, the approaches will be recomposed to enrich the debate on theoretical and prescriptive contributions of power sharing in Lebanon.

Coalition Politics in the Netherlands: From Accommodation to Politicization

Consociational theory leads us to expect relatively inclusive coalitions, relatively egalitarian and depoliticized cabinets, and relatively stable governments during the heyday of pillarization (1945–1966). Compared to that period, coalitions have indeed become less inclusive, more politicized, and slightly less stable. There is less empirical evidence of a significant change towards more hierarchical cabinets. In addition, the data in this paper also contradict some widely held beliefs about post-consociational coalition politics: there is no evidence that cabinet crises used to result in the formation of a new coalition before 1967, and to immediate elections since 1967; and there is no evidence that since 1967 cabinet crises and ministerial resignations result more often from a conflict in the cabinet room rather than from a conflict between parliament and government. Especially since 1987, a more assertive attitude of parliament appears to have influenced this development.

Parliamentary Opposition in Post-Consociational Democracies: Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands

This paper derives various hypotheses about parliamentary opposition in Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands from consociational theory, with the common denominator that there was cooperation rather than competition among the main political parties. Although to varying degrees, and with significant exceptions, this expectation was largely confirmed. Since the 1960s, though, each of these countries has experienced some degree of de-pillarisation, which had the hypothesised effect of increased competition in the electoral and parliamentary arenas. However, at the same time the main parties lost some of their ideological distinctiveness, leading to a major change in the basic opposition patterns that could be characterised, with some exaggeration, as having evolved ‘from opposition without competition to competition without opposition’. In the 1960s Arend Lijphart predicted that this would lead to anti-system opposition from the radical Left. Contrary to that expectation, the three countries witnessed challenges from the populist Right, with important differences between Belgium on the one hand, and Austria and the Netherlands on the other, as to the reaction by the main parties to this new opposition.

The Basque power‐sharing experience: from a destructive to a constructive conflict?

ABSTRACT. Neither the devolution of powers to the Basque Autonomous Community in Spain nor more than a decade of power‐sharing within this region has led to a peaceful settlement of the Basque conflict. Combining Kriesberg's approach to conflict resolution and consociational theory, past power‐sharing experiences are analysed. The lack of overarching loyalties, traditions of compromise, comprehensive participation and the continuation of violence have frustrated power‐sharing. After the 2006 ceasefire, the conditions for giving the conflict a constructive turn have not fundamentally changed. The potential for alternative forms of power‐sharing as a way out of the Basque conflict, combined or not with innovative territorial arrangements cannot be employed because of multi‐scale polarisation. De‐escalation as a prerequisite for new types of power‐sharing arrangements requires relearning democratic pluralism and a recognition of ethnic hybridity in this politically and geographically fragmented society.