Crisis, Opportunities, and Consociational Federalism: Reassessing Lijphart’s Work After Half a Century of Consociationalism

Half a century ago, Dutch political scientist Arend Lijphart crafted the concept of consociational democracy (or consociationalism). His theory first aimed at explaining how divided societies could be politically stable, but was then used as a normative attempt to propose an institutional framework for power-sharing arrangements in plural contexts. For Lijphart, this framework is to be used to address the structural “crisis” that is looming in divided societies, a crisis that results from the majority-minority(ies) relationships. The concept of consociationalism, when it is combined or merged... Mehr ...