Lijphart

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In his book, Patterns of Democracy, Arend Lijphart seeks to evaluate whether his distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy, as presented in his book, Democracy in Plural Society, remains valid. Furthermore, Lijphart wishes to examine its bearing on regime performance.

While not all of Lijphart’s measurements are equally convincing on that point, the tables and diagrams in his book provide a reasonable and acceptable picture of how each country fits into a general pattern of stable democratic politics. This approach is distinctly ambitious – examining a greater number of countries than his previous effort. Lijphart suggests Great Britain as the conventional majoritarian democracy – it was majoritarian on Lijhart’s ten indicators from 1945 to 1996. Lijphart presents Switzerland, Belgium and even the European Union as exemplars of consensus democracy. Consensus democracy, in Lijphart’s view, have “kinder, gentler” traits – a topic to which this book review will return. In sum, Lijphart recommends “consensus democracy” as an ideal governance type for any state – not just one with “deep ethnic, linguistic, religious or ideological cleavages.”

Lijphart’s discourse on federalism is particularly interesting. He favours the “secondary characteristics” of this type of regime – such as the prohibition of the national majority being able to move power away from the federal units and back to the central government. This dovetails with his view of “congruent federalism”, by which to say, countries whereby federal lines are not drawn with ethnic groups in mind (such as the United States) and “incongruent federalism”, which may have an ethnic, religious or linguistic homogeneity (as in Switzerland and India)....

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...lenge to majoritarians and other skeptics.

Boivin: Lijphart argues that some of the key indicators of majoritarian systems are first-past-the-post election mechanisms that exaggerate a party's political representations ingle-party cabinets, strong executives, unicameral legislatures, unitary government structures, a competitive pluralism of interest groups and executive controlled central banks.

Boivin: The flaw is rooted in the fact that Lijphart conflates the ideal of majoritarian democracy with the Western model, the majoritarian system of Great britain. In other words, it is not always clear whether Lijphart's modes are deduces as ideal types or drawn from actual cases. A better approach would have been to stick much more closely to the purely deductive method with which he starts, in order to build truly ideal types against which to contrast real-life cases.