Thomas Landwehrlen                                                                                                        11/03/2005

M2 “comparative politics”

 

Course point

Majoritarian vs. Consensus Democracies :

Arend Lijphart and the two forms of real democracy

 

 

            Arend Lijphart, who is research professor of political science at the University of California, published in 1984 an acclaimed book entitled Democracies [1] in which he claimed that the main institutional rules and practices of modern democracies – such as party systems, electoral systems or the organisation of executives – could all be measured on scales from “majoritarianism” at one end to “consensus” on the other, and that a two-dimensional “conceptual map” of democracy could be drawn on which each of the democratic systems could be located. To reinforce the theoretical framework developed in this comparative study based on twenty-one countries, Lijphart decided at the end of the nineties to examine updated materials and to analyse the institutional characteristics of fifteen other democratic countries. As a result of his investigation, he published the famous book Patterns of democracy [2] in which two main questions are tackled: What are the different forms that  real democracies can assume? And does the type of democracy make a difference, especially with regard to effective economic and the quality of democracy?

 

I- The majoritarian-consensus contrast:   

            Defining real democracy as “government by and for the people” – as President Abraham Lincoln made it in the famous Gettysburg address – raises a fundamental question: who will do the governing and to whose interests should the government be responsive when the people have divergent preferences? One simple answer to this dilemma is: “the majority of the citizens”. But an alternative answer is: “as many people as possible”. The first solution is at the root of the majoritarian model of democracy – sometimes called “Westminster model” – whereas the second is the crux of the consensus model.

            The most important property of a majoritarian democracy is that a mere majority of the people governs. The power is always concentrated in the hands of a narrow decision-making majority, and the parties take consequently their decisions in a competitive and adversarial context. A consensus democracy, that aims in contrast at broad participation in government and broad agreement on the policies the executive should pursue, accepts majority rule only as a minimum requirement, and is characterized by inclusiveness and compromise; for this reason, consensus democracy could also be termed “negociation democracy” (according to the expression of A.  Kaiser [3] ).

According to Lijphart the concentration of power, which is the essence of the Westminster model, can be avoided in two ways, insofar as the consensus model can take the two basic forms of sharing of power and division of power. Hence, a crucial distinction is whether in consensus democracy power is dispersed to political actors operating together within the same political institutions or dispersed to separate political institutions. Using this distinction, Lijphart distinguishes two dimensions of the majoritarian-consensus contrast. The first one, called executives-party  dimension (or joint-power dimension), is associated with five characteristics of the arrangement of executive power, the party and electoral systems, and interest groups. The second one, called federal-unitary dimension (or divided-power dimension), groups five characteristics related to the contrast between centralized and federal government.

The ten characteristics can be formulated in terms of dichotomous contrast between the majoritarian and consensus models, but they constitute all gradual variables on which particular countries may be at either end of the continuum or anywhere in between. The five differences on the executives-parties dimension are the following:

1. Concentration of executive power in single-party majority cabinets versus executive power-sharing in broad multiparty coalitions;

2. Executive-legislative relationships in which the executive is dominant versus executive-legislative balance of power;

3. Two-party systems versus multiparty systems

4. Majoritarian and disproportional electoral systems versus proportional representation

5. Pluralist interest group systems with free-for-all competition versus coordinated and “corporatist” interest group systems aimed at compromise and cooperation.

The five differences on the federal-unitary dimension are as follows:

            1. Unitary and centralized governments versus federal and decentralized governments

2. Concentration of legislative power in an unicameral legislature versus division of legislative power between two equally strong but differently constituted houses;

3. Flexible constitutions that can be amended by simple majorities versus rigid constitutions that can be changed only by extraordinary majorities;

4. Systems in which legislature have the final word on the constitutionality of their own legislation versus systems in which laws are subject to a judicial review of their constitutionality by supreme or constitutional courts;

5. Central banks that are dependent of the executive versus independent central banks.

Lijphart, who underlines the fact that relatively pure majoritarian or consensus democracies are actually quite rare (limited to United Kingdom, New Zealand and Barbados for the first democratic model, and to Switzerland and Belgium for the second), shows that the variables of the first group are empirically significantly correlated with each other, as well as the variables of the second group. But the American political scientist, who made initially the hypothesis that the ten variables clustered in the two dimensions would tend to occur together, finds that these variables are not empirically correlated with each other [4] . This result suggests that non-majoritarian democracies tend to have clear preferences for either the shared-power approach or the divided-power approach. The problem that is not solved is why the two preceding dimensions are almost completely unrelated to each other, that is why there are so clearly alternative approaches.

 

II- The superiority of the consensus model

            Lijphart notes that there is a persistent tendency in political science to equate representative democracy solely with majoritarian democracy and to refuse to recognize consensus democracy as an alternative and equally legitimate type. A clear example of this way of thinking can be found in Stephanie Lawson's argument that a strong political opposition is “the sine qua non of the contemporary democracy” and that it has to search firstly to form the next government [5] .

Against the conventional wisdom, that suggests that majoritarian democracies like those in the United States and Great Britain are superior to consensual systems like those in Netherlands and Israel, Lijphart claims that the second may be considered as better than the first in some respects. He agrees that the differences are small with regard to macro-economic policy outcomes: consen-sual political systems stimulate economic growth, control inflation and employment, and limits budget deficits as well as majoritarian democracies do. But consensus democracies clearly outperform majoritarian systems on measures of political equality, women's representation, citizen participation in elections, proximity between government policies and voter preferences, and finally citizen satisfaction with democracy. The more consensual is a democracy, the “kinder and gentler” it is when addressing such issues as welfare, the environment, criminal justice, and foreign aid. These findings are important not only for countries designing their first democratic constitutions, but also for established democracies seeking practical approach to reform.

This theory, however, is not totally convincing. It is not obvious that coalitional governments are always more representative and democratic than single-party majority cabinets, as parties under proportional representation tend to represent narrower interests than the ones under majoritarian rules. Erik Moberg, in order to throw more light on the majoritarian-consensus contrast, proposed two examples that underline the possible coexistence of consensus and majority elections, as well as the possible conjunction of majoritarianism and proportional representation. The first example is about a democratic system which has majority elections and a two-party system. This country, consequently, have also usually one-party cabinets. If we assume that the policies proposed by the parties can be located on an ideological scale (a left-right scale), we can suppose that the policies of both parties, according to the median voter theorem developed by authors like H. Hotelling, E. E. Schattschneider or A. Downs, are close to the median voter position. This means that the leftist party will stand for the policy advocated by its right wing, and that the rightist party, symmetrically, will deliver the policy promoted by its left wing. In this situation, it is quite reasonable to speak about consensus policies: the median voter position is the median position of all voters, insofar as all voters affect the policy outcomes. The second example is about a country with proportional elections and a multiparty system. This means that this country has usually coalition cabinets. If we assume that political ideologies are not very important, and that the cabinet members consider politics as a zero-sum game in which redistributions of state resources among the participants are fundamental, the theorem of minimal winning coalitions stated by William H. Riker is applicable [6] . As the majority wants to maximize the number of those who are exploited, and minimize the number of those sharing the spoils, it has to be as small as possible. We have in this case a typical majoritarian situation, in which the cabinets satisfy their own interests to the detriment of the outside minority.

 

Examining unmatched collection of data and mobilizing relevant literature, Arend Lijphart established anyhow an important distinction between two different forms of real democracy, that constitutes today a backbone of several scientific books. Moreover, he undertook to analyse the links that exist between institutional characteristics and policy-making performance, whereas most political scientists don't discuss at all the welfare effects of political systems. Lijphart's work, in this respect, is praiseworthy.


[1] Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1984.

[2] Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999.

[3] “Types of Democracy: From Classical to New Institutionalism”, Journal of Theoretical Politics 9, n°4, Oct. 1997,    pp. 419-444.

[4] Cf. Chapter 14 Patterns of Democracy (pp. 243-257)

[5] “Conceptual Issues in the Comparative Study of Regime Change and Democratization”, Comparative Politics 25, n°2, January 1993, pp. 183-205.

[6] The Theory of Political Coalitions, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1962. Riker's “size principle” predicts that only minimal winning coalitions will be formed. These coalitions contain only parties that are minimally necessary to give the cabinets majority status.