Abstract
This chapter provides a sketch of the book’s hypothesis of multiculturalism’s survival and discusses its theoretical underpinnings. It also offers brief summaries of the case selection and comparative methodology used to develop the hypothesis and of the way in which the book operationalizes multiculturalism’s survival. The chapter’s final section provides further clarification about a range of issues such as the benefits and trade-offs of the book’s indicators of multiculturalism survival, the choice to omit cases that might appear to be natural fits for the purposes of multicultural theory building, and the decision to focus on different policy realms across the Canadian, British, and American case studies.
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Notes
- 1.
In brief, Riker’s theory of minimum winning coalitions holds that “participants create coalitions just as large as they believe will ensure winning and no larger” (1962, 32–33). Riker ’s theory stands in contradistinction to Anthony Downs’ theory that office seekers set out to form “maximum winning coalitions” in order to ensure their success (Hershey 1973, 636).
- 2.
As an additional note, Kaare Strom’s Minority Government and Majority Rule (1990) provides an alternative to Riker ’s Theory of Coalition Formation (1962), arguing that there are strong rational incentives for potential coalition partners not to join and thus form a “minimum winning coalition” (this in turn results in the formation of minority governments).
- 3.
Tsebelis (1995) identifies two kinds of veto players: “institutional veto players” and “partisan veto players.” According to Tsebelis (pp. 301–302) “institutional veto players” are by-products of a separation of powers (i.e. executive, legislative, judicial) and the concomitant existence of a system of checks and balances. By contrast partisan veto players are unique to multiparty systems; they are “the parties that are members of a government coalition” (p. 302). In this book, the focus is on “institutional veto players.”
- 4.
Another way of stating the justification for the case selection is that Canada, Britain and the United States are immigrant-receiving countries where recent policy developments in the realm of multiculturalism present us with a puzzle. The object of puzzle-solving in comparative politics is not to dismiss these expectations but to identify the mechanisms or factors that intervene between cause and effect that can explain an unexpected outcome (Grofman 2001, 1). Thus the three cases under examination in this book were selected precisely because the trajectory that multiculturalism has followed under centre-right governments defies the commonsensical link between ideological shifts to the right and expected multicultural outcomes.
- 5.
The MCP index has implemented two ways of scoring policies over the years. In “Do Multiculturalism policies erode the welfare state? An empirical analysis” (Banting et al. 2006), policies that are “explicitly adopted and implemented” are given a full score of ‘1,’ policies that are adopted “in an implicit, incomplete, or token manner” are given a score of ‘0.5,’ and a score of ‘0’ is given to countries “if it did not have that policy” (see p. 58). The more recent iterations of the MCP index implement a slightly different scoring system. More specifically, policies that receive a score of ‘0.5’ are deemed to have adopted and implemented a specific MCP in either a “limited” manner or “partially” (see Queens’ University 2015).
- 6.
In 2012, Mark Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy formed a centrist coalition with the Labour Party which signalled a shift from the right to the centre. It is beyond the scope of this book to determine what has happened to Dutch multiculturalism since the 2017 formation of a centre-right coalition government.
- 7.
The second Balkenende Cabinet (2003–2006) consisted of the Christian Democratic Appeal, the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie and Democraten 66. In 2006, Democraten 66 left the coalition leading to the formation of the third Balenende Cabinet (2006–2010).
- 8.
The first Ruute Cabinet (2010–2012) was established following the 2010 general elections. It was a coalition government between the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie and the Christian Union, a socially conservative political faction.
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Tremblay, A. (2019). Developing a Hypothesis of Multicultural Outcomes: Theory, Case Selection, Methodology and Clarifications. In: Diversity in Decline? . Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02299-0_3
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