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Consociational Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Arend Lijphart
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In Gabriel A. Almond's famous typology of political systems, first expounded in 1956, he distinguishes three types of Western democratic systems: Anglo-American political systems (exemplified by Britain and the United States), Continental European political systems (France, Germany, and Italy), and a third category consisting of the Scandinavian and Low Countries. The third type is not given a distinct label and is not described in detail; Almond merely states that the countries belonging to this type “combine some of the features of the Continental European and the Anglo-American” political systems, and “stand somewhere in between the Continental pattern and the Anglo-American.” Almond's threefold typology has been highly influential in the comparative analysis of democratic politics, although, like any provocative and insightful idea, it has also been criticized. This research note will discuss the concept of “consociational democracy” in a constructive attempt to refine and elaborate Almond's typology of democracies.

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Type
Research Article
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World Politics , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , January 1969, pp. 207 - 225
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1969

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References

1 Gabriel A. Almond, ”Comparative Political Systems,” Journal of Politics, xviii (August 1956), 392–93. 405.

2 Ibid., 398–99, 405–07 (italics omitted).

3 , Kalleberg, “The Logic of Comparison: A Methodological Note on the Comparative Study of Political Systems,” World Politics, xix (October 1966), 73–74Google Scholar. Hans Daalder's critical question “Why should France, Germany, and Italy be more ‘continental,’ tlian Holland, or Switzerland, or more ‘European’ than Britain?” seems to be based on a similar erroneous interpretation; see his “Parties, Elites, and Political Developments in Western Europe,” in LaPalombara, Joseph and Weiner, Myron, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton 1966), 43nCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Almond, 392. There is also no reason, therefore, to call the exclusion of Scandinavia and the Low Countries from the “Continental European” systems an “artificial qualifier,” as Kalleberg does, 74.

5 Almond, 408.

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13 “A Functional Approach,” 42.

14 Cf. Johannes Althusius’ concept of consociatio in his Politica Methodice Digesta, and the term “consociational” used by Apter, David E., The Political Kingdom in Uganda: A Study in Bureaucratic Nationalism (Princeton 1961), 24–25Google Scholar.

15 Ake, Claude, A Theory of Political Integration (Homewood 1967), 113Google Scholar. This possibility exists not only in the fragmented democracies, but also in fragmented predemo-cratic or nondemocratic systems, of course. See also Lijphart, Arend, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (Berkeley 1968), 1–15, 197–211Google Scholar.

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38 Nor does the reverse assumption hold true. Giovanni Sartori relates the instability of Italian democracy to “poor leadership, both in the sense that the political elites lack the ability for problem-solving and that they do not provide a generalized leadership.” This weakness of leadership, he continues, “is easily explained by the fragmentation of the party system and its ideological rigidity.” (“European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism,” in LaPalombara and Weiner, eds., Political Parties and Political Development, 163.) The example of the consociational democracies shows that this is not a sufficient explanation.

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