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Understanding Patterns of Democracy: Reconsidering Societal Divisions and Bringing Societal Culture Back In

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Consociationalism and Power-Sharing in Europe

Part of the book series: International Political Theory ((IPoT))

Abstract

Which types of democratic institutions are best to be adopted in divided societies? This chapter builds upon Arend Lijphart’s typologies of democracies (1968–1999), as they have played an important role in the academic debates on institutional reforms and the ‘engineering’ of democratic systems. Doorenspleet and Maleki first provide a short overview of Lijphart’s work in order to show that culture has become less important when studying political institutions. The authors recommend to reintroduce Lijphart’s older ideas and bring societal culture back in. This shift results in a new research agenda, embracing culture as one of the key factors. This is an inclusive rather than exclusive approach to culture; that is, different cultures can establish democracy if they adopt a compatible democratic model. Conceptually, the chapter presents and defines the new idea of ‘cultural compatibility’; when a country’s type of political system is well matched with its dominant cultural orientation, then there is ‘cultural compatibility’. The authors argue that cultural compatibility matters, that is, as it has a positive impact on how democracy works in practice in a country. Empirically, they explore the link between types of democracies (consensus vs. majoritarian systems), societal culture (whether a country’s cultural orientation is mastery or harmony) and societal structure (whether a society is divided or homogeneous). They also present a new operationalization for the concept of ‘divided societies’. In this chapter, Doorenspleet and Maleki do not take Lijphart’s assumptions for granted, but investigate them in cross-national comparative research. They conclude that cultural compatibility is important and deserves more attention in future studies of political institutions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Andeweg (2000) for an excellent overview; see also the bibliographies in all the books by Arend Lijphart (i.e. 1999, 2012).

  2. 2.

    See also Van Schendelen (1985: 149). Lijphart has used the term ‘fragmented political culture’ in this context as well. To avoid confusion, however, we make a clear distinction between societal culture (or ‘a country’s cultural orientation’) and societal structure (‘divided societies’) in our chapter.

  3. 3.

    Another form of democratic government is a majoritarian system, which is characterized by a homogeneous societal structure with competitive elite behaviour (see also Bogaards 2000: 401).

  4. 4.

    This shift is well described by Bogaards (2000).

  5. 5.

    Although Lijphart still keeps focusing on stable democracies , so in this sense the range of countries is certainly not all-encompassing (see e.g. Lijphart 1999, 2012).

  6. 6.

    Since Lijphart’s 1984 book.

  7. 7.

    To be more precise, Lijphart only selected countries which are classified as ‘free’ by the Freedom House; in this way, he has extracted the democracies which have been central in his work since 1984.

  8. 8.

    The two other criteria are that (a) the boundaries between the segments and between political, social, and economic organizations must coincide; (b) the segmental parties must receive stable electoral support from the respective segments.

  9. 9.

    Or ‘cultural’, as Fearon (2003) calls it in his work.

  10. 10.

    For a review see Maleki and de Jong (2014).

  11. 11.

    Israel , like the Netherlands , has had a very low electoral threshold of 1 per cent resulting in a high effective number of parties in parliament which in turn leads to a challenging process of coalition making and unstable governments. In recent decades, some changes have been adopted to transform Israeli’s democratic model to a less consensual democracy by introducing a direct election for the prime minister between 1992 and 2003 (Hazan 1996), and recently by increasing the electoral threshold to 3.25 per cent (Lis 2014).

  12. 12.

    Moreover, in their regression analysis, they added a control variable for societal division and found no significant impact of fractionalization on the relation between democratic models and societal culture.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Renske Doorenspleet

  2. Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands

    Ammar Maleki

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  1. Renske Doorenspleet
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  2. Ammar Maleki
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Michaelina Jakala

  2. Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Durukan Kuzu

  3. Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom

    Matt Qvortrup

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Doorenspleet, R., Maleki, A. (2018). Understanding Patterns of Democracy: Reconsidering Societal Divisions and Bringing Societal Culture Back In. In: Jakala, M., Kuzu, D., Qvortrup, M. (eds) Consociationalism and Power-Sharing in Europe. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67098-0_2

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