The fate of centrifugal democracies: Lessons from consociational theory and system performance

Comparative Politics

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 317-332

  Siaroff, Alan ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0038851967     PISSN: 00104159     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/422369     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. Arend Lijphart, "Typologies of Democratic Systems," Comparative Political Studies, 1 (April 1968), 3-44;
2. Arend Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," World Politics, 21 (October 1969), 207-25;
3. Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
4. Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," p. 212.
5. Arend Lijphart, personal communication, August 4, 1997.
6. Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," p. 222;
7. Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies, p. 114.
8. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 132-40. In a simplified version, Sartori, p. 292, refers to the combination of high party fragmentation and high ideological distance.
9. See also Giovanni Sartori, "European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism," in Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Wiener, eds., Political Parties and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 138-39.
10. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, p. 140.
11. One thinks here of Robert A. Dahl's comment on the Netherlands: "Theoretically your country cannot exist." Cited in Rudy B. Andeweg and Galen A. Irwin, Dutch Government and Politics (London: Macmillan, 1993), p. 33.
12. Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies, p. 114.
13. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, p. 155.
14. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, p. 155. Ibid.
15. Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 25.
16. "In its sixteen years, there were seven congressional elections, and eight for president; and forty-five governments rose and fell." Walter C. Opello, Jr., Portugal's Political Development: A Comparative Approach (Boulder: Westview, 1985), p. 40.
17. Howard A. Wiarda, "Spain and Portugal," in Peter H. Merkl, ed., Western European Party Systems: Trends and Prospects (New York: Free Press, 1980), p. 301.
18. Howard A. Wiarda, Western European Party Systems: Trends and Prospects Ibid., pp. 301-2.
19. Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 172-73.
20. Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems Ibid., p. 215.
21. Arend Lijphart, "Introduction: The Belgian Example of Cultural Coexistence in Comparative Perspective," in Arend Lijphart, ed., Conflict and Coexistence in Belgium: The Dynamics of a Culturally Divided Society (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1981), p. 1.
22. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, "Introduction: Party Systems in Latin America," in Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, eds., Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 31-32.
23. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America Ibid., pp. 17-20.
24. Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 174.
25. These parties were the Democratic Social Party, the National Democratic Union, and the Brazilian Labor Party. See Scott Mainwaring, "Brazil: Weak Parties, Feckless Democracy," in Mainwaring and Scully, eds., pp. 359-61.
26. Alfred Stepan, "Political Leadership and Regime Breakdown: Brazil," in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 117.
27. Jeffrey J. Ryan, "Democratic Transition and Consolidation in a Polarized System: The Role of the Center in El Salvador," Party Politics, 3 (1997), 169-88.
28. More precisely, the French Third Republic, Portugal 1910-1926, and Italy after World War I were only (centrifugal) male democracies, and in Brazil until 1988 illiterates did not have the right to vote.
29. For example, the notion of polarized pluralism certainly applies to the regional party system of the Basque country. See Francisco José Llera Ramo, "La construcción del pluralismo polarizado vasco," in Pilar del Castillo, ed., Comportamiento político y electoral, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1995), pp. 275-95.
30. Scully, however, offers a contrary view. He argues that "polarization and rigidity in the party system took root during the period from 1952 to 1958, well before the rise to predominance of the Christian Democrats in the mid-1960s." Timothy R. Scully, Rethinking the Center: Party Politics in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 147.
31. Ryan, "Democratic Transition and Consolidation in a Polarized System."
32. Voitto Helander, "A Liberal-Corporatist Sub-system in Action: The Incomes Policy System in Finland," in Gerhard Lehmbruch and Philippe C. Schmitter, eds., Patterns of Corporatist Policy-Making (London: Sage, 1982), pp. 169-70.
33. Arend Lijphart and Markus Crepaz, "Corporatism and Consensus Democracy in Eighteen Countries," British Journal of Political Science, 21 (1991), 235-46.
34. As even Sartori noted in the mid 1970s, "a system of polarized pluralism can endure only if the centrifugal tactics of electoral competition are lessened, or eventually counteracted, in the other arenas. This is doubtlessly the case with Italy. Thus the centripetal convergence that may be said to exist among Communist and bourgeois party leaders at the invisible levels goes to explain how the Italian polity enjoys the longest record of survival of the type [polarized pluralism]." Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, p. 145.
35. Arend Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1985), p. 120.
36. Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," pp. 216-22.
37. Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa, pp. 119-26;
38. Arend Lijphart, "The Power-Sharing Approach," in Joseph V. Montville, ed., Conflict and Peacemaking in Multiethnic Societies (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1990), pp. 497-98;
39. Arend Lijphart, "The Puzzle of Indian Democracy: A Consociational Interpretation," American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), 262-63.
40. Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa, p. 127;
41. Lijphart, "The Power-Sharing Approach," p. 497;
42. Lijphart, "The Puzzle of Indian Democracy," p. 262.
43. Lijphart, Power-Sharing in South Africa, p. 119.
44. R. D. Anderson, France 1870-1914: Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 141.
45. Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," p. 217.
46. Robert Leonardi, "The International Context of Democratic Transition in Postwar Italy: A Case of Penetration," in Geoffrey Pridham, ed., Encouraging Democracy: The International Context of Regime Transition in Southern Europe (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991), pp. 62-83.
47. The country sources for Table 1 are, for Austria, Walter F. Simon, "Democracy in the Shadow of Imposed Sovereignty: The First Republic of Austria," in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 80-120;
48. F. L. Carsten, The First Austrian Republic: 1918-1938 (London: Gower, 1986);
49. for Belgium, John Fitzmaurice, The Politics of Belgium, rev. ed. (London: C. Hurst, 1988);
50. John Fitzmaurice; The Politics of Belgium: A Unique Federalism (Boulder: Westview, 1996);
51. for Brazil, Alfred Stepan, "Political Leadership and Regime Breakdown: Brazil," in Linz and Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America, pp. 110-37;
52. Bolívar Lamounier, "Brazil: Inequality against Democracy," in Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989), pp. 111-57;
53. for Chile, Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Chile (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978);
54. Arturo Valenzuela, "Chile: Origins, Consolidation, and Breakdown of a Democratic Regime," in Diamond, Linz, and Lipset, eds., Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America, pp. 159-206;
55. for El Salvador, Joseph S. Tulchin and Gary Bland, eds., Is There a Transition to Democracy in El Salvador? (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992);
56. Jeffrey J. Ryan, "Democratic Transition and Consolidation in a Polarized System: The Role of the Center in El Salvador," Party Politics, 3 (1997), 169-88;
57. for Finland, D. G. Kirby, Finland in the Twentieth Century (London: Hurst, 1979);
58. David Arter, Politics and Policy-Making in Finland (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1987);
59. for France, David Thompson, Democracy in France since 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969);
60. Robert Gildea, The Third Republic from 1870 to 1914 (London: Longman, 1988);
61. for Italy, Paolo Farneti, "Social Conflict, Parliamentary Fragmentation, Institutional Shift, and the Rise of Fascism: Italy," in Linz and Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe, pp. 3-33;
62. Roger Absalom, Italy since 1800: A Nation in the Balance? (Harlow: Longman, 1995);
63. for Portugal, Douglas L. Wheeler, Republican Portugal: A Political History, 1910-1926 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978);
64. Walter C. Opello, Jr., Portugal's Political Development: A Comparative Approach (Boulder: Westview, 1985);
65. Kathleen C. Schwartzman, The Social Origins of Democratic Collapse: The First Portuguese Republic in the Global Economy (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1989);
66. for Spain, Juan J. Linz, "From Great Hopes to Civil War: The Breakdown of Democracy in Spain," in Linz and Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe, pp. 142-215;
67. Stanley Payne, Spain's First Democracy: The Second Republic, 1931-1936 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993);
68. for Weimar Germany, M. Rainer Lepsius, "From Fragmented Party Democracy to Government by Emergency Decree and National Socialist Takeover: Germany," in Linz and Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Europe, pp. 34-79;
69. Gordon Smith, Democracy in Western Germany, 3rd ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986).
70. Sartori, Parties and Party Systems, p. 140.
71. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, pp. 16-23.
72. Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies, p. 116,
73. quoting Maurice Duverger, "The Development of Democracy in France," in Henry W. Ehrmann, ed., Democracy in a Changing Society (New York: Praeger, 1964), p. 77.
74. Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," p. 218.
75. Arend Lijphart, personal communication, November 8, 1996.
76. An average rate of at least 4 percent a year scores a +, a rate of less than 1.5 percent a year scores a -, and growth levels in between score a 0.
77. The country sources for Table 2 are the same as those in Table 1, plus the author's calculations from Angus Maddison, Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991);
78. Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy 1820-1992 (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 1995);
79. George R. Vickers, "The Political Reality after Eleven Years of War," in Tulchin and Bland, eds., Is There a Transition to Democracy in El Salvador?, p. 30.
80. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration, p. 14. Linz was referring to post-World War I Italy. However, it is worth stressing that perhaps the biggest threat to post-World War II Italian democracy came just after the 1963 elections, which produced both an increase in the Communist vote and the "opening to the left" (the entry of the Socialists into government). In 1964, it was discovered that the head of the secret service, General Giovanni De Lorenzo, had "planned and all but implemented" a coup d'etat which would have installed an authoritarian anticommunist government.
81. Absalom, Italy since 1800, p. 255. In 1960 Christian Democratic Prime Minister Fernando Tambroni actually made an alliance with the neo-Fascist MSI, but he was forced from office after four turbulent demonstration-filled months. Absalom, pp. 229-31.
82. "The goal of the French Popular Front, however, was primarily to defend the existing French democracy against the menace of fascism. It did propose certain social reforms, though these were proportionately more modest than those of its Spanish counterpart, and it included no sizable groups which insisted on a rapid transformation into revolutionary collectivism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, as in the Spanish case. The French Popular Front did not propose major institutional changes to insure the future political predominance of the left, but made of democracy a value in its own right....The Spanish Popular Front stood somewhat to the left of its French counterpart, nonetheless, and thus was able - when combined with the hard rightist position of its main adversaries - to contribute to a decisive national political polarization which never took place in France." Payne, Spain's First Democracy, p. 267.
83. Robert Elliot Kaplan, Forgotten Crisis: The Fin-de-Siècle Crisis of Democracy in France (Oxford: Berg, 1995), p. 5.
84. Robert Elliot Kaplan, Forgotten Crisis: The Fin-de-Siècle Crisis of Democracy in France Ibid., pp. 66-83, 156.
85. Schwartzman, The Social Origins of Democratic Collapse, p. 46.
86. Wheeler, Republican Portugal: A Political History, p. 210.
87. "Let us imagine for a moment that there had been no Algerian war. In that case I would today [1960s] be lecturing about the Fourth Republic, and I would say that it is a regime with frequent cabinet crises and not very popular among the people. I would say that it has an efficient bureaucracy and remarkably good democratic administrators and that it has achieved considerable economic expansion" [due presumably to the technocrats and not the politicians]. Duverger, "The Development of Democracy in France," p. 77.
88. Stanley Hoffmann, "Paradoxes of the French Political Community," in Stanley Hoffmann et al., In Search of France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 3ff.
89. Stanley Hoffmann, In Search of France Ibid., pp. 15, 17.
90. Absalom, Italy since 1800, p. 254.
91. Leonardi, "The International Context of Democratic Transition in Postwar Italy," p. 80.
92. Lijphart, "Consociational Democracy," p. 216.