Abstract
The first edition of Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy (Yale University Press, 1999) has been praised as a seminal contribution to the comparative study of democracies. The revised edition, published in 2012, advances even stronger arguments with better data and a better methodology in support of Lijphart’s key message: consensus democracies are superior to majoritarian democracies—measured by a wide variety of indicators of participation, contestation, policy outputs and policy outcomes. The present chapter is an assessment of the revised edition of Lijphart’s book. Starting from a comparison of two schools of research on non-majoritarian democracies—Lijphart’s approach and Lehmbruch’s contributions to the study consociational democracy—, the commentary reports the changes in the second edition of Patterns of Democracy (such as updated data sources and a more comprehensive and rigorous analysis of the relationship between types of democracy and policy indicators), and discusses the many merits and the few limits of Lijphart’s book. The 2012 edition is another milestone in empirical democratic theory even if it reproduces some of the limits of the first edition. Both editions of Patterns of Democracy disregard deviant cases (such as the strong welfare state in a majoritarian democracy in France), tend to overestimate the exportability of consensus democracy, and abstain from complementing the association between democratic institutions and policy output and outcomes with agency-centred variables, such as parties in office. Moreover, both editions focus attention ultimately on two worlds of democracy while Lijphart’s data suggest the usefulness of distinguishing between four worlds of democracy: unitary majoritarian democracy (like Great Britain), federalist majoritarian democracy (such as the United States of America), unitary consensus democracy (the northern European countries) and federalist consensus democracy (Germany and Switzerland). The distinction between four types of democracy also allows for a more precise identification of some of the mechanisms which account for the success of consensus democracies. There are two different roads that lead to superior performance of consensus democracies: one is based on federalism and the other on a unitary state, and, hence, to some extent on a majoritarian device.
Translation of original text from German into English by Deanna Stewart.
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- 1.
In future updates of the study, more than two dozen additional democracies will be added to the list if these selection criteria continue to be adhered to, including the post-communist democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.
- 2.
Still, the differences between Germany and Switzerland are worth noting: Germany has much higher scores on the index of executive dominance and the index of judicial review of legislation. However, Lijphart has once again neglected (as in the 1999 edition) one particularly striking difference, that between Germany’s representative democracy and Switzerland’s direct democracy.
- 3.
On the other hand, he mainly ignored critical commentary on other parts of the 1999 edition, such as Adrian Vatter’s suggestion that direct democracy should be incorporated into the concept of majoritarian and consensus democracies (Vatter 2009).
- 4.
Evaluation based only on those OECD member states included among the 36 countries in the Lijphart study, as in Lijphart’s analyses of welfare spending and spending on foreign aid (Lijphart 2012: 290).
- 5.
Lijphart has explained the difference between consensus democracy and consociational democracy elsewhere (Lijphart 2008a: 8f): consensus democracy is measured using ten quantitative indicators of rather formal institutional characteristics; consociational democracy, on the other hand, is based on the qualitative identification of four very broad components that emphasize informal aspects, namely, large coalitions, autonomous segments in a divided society, proportionality and minority rights. While both forms of democracy are possible in deeply divided countries, consociational democracy is “the stronger medicine” (Lijphart 2008a: 8); consociational democracy demands the inclusion of all important groups, while most consensus democracies only set incentives for cooperative behavior (Armingeon 2011: 555).
- 6.
- 7.
The same thing applies for liberal parties—if nothing else, it is an effect of the system of proportional representation found in the consensus democracies.
Fig. 3 
Executives–party dimension according to Lijphart (2012) and partisan composition of the government, as measured by the proportion of cabinet seats held by secular–conservative parties (1945–2010)
Fig. 4 
Executives–party dimension according to Lijphart (2012) and the participation of social democratic and secular conservative parties in government (1945–2010)
- 8.
An examination of Lijphart’s data leads to the same result in the case of two other indicators: the budget deficit (2003–2007) and spending on development and collaboration. The other indicators of outputs and outcomes in the Lijphart study are not affected, though, by the situation discussed here (Lijphart 2012: 304–309; see also the policy output and outcome data posted on Lijphart’s web site, UC San Diego 2014). The indicators of the partisan composition of governments are taken from a database compiled by the author. For more on the definition and measurement of party families, see Schmidt (1996) and Schmidt (2010a).
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Schmidt, M.G. (2015). The Four Worlds of Democracy: Commentary on Arend Lijphart’s Revised Edition of Patterns of Democracy (2012). In: Schneider, V., Eberlein, B. (eds) Complex Democracy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15850-1_3
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