Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-Making: Adversarial versus Consensual

Politics
Author(s): Kenneth D. McRae
Source: International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique
, Jul., 1997, Vol. 18, No. 3, Contrasting Political Institutions. Institutions politiques
contrastées (Jul., 1997), pp. 279-295
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1601344

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International Political Science Review (1997), Vol. 18, No. 3, 279-295

Contrasting Styles of Democratic

Decision-making: Adversarial versus
Consensual Politics

KENNETH D. MCRAE

ABSTRACT. The notion of "consociational democracy" originated from

prolonged debates in the 1950s over prerequisites for democratic stability.
The concept then spread rapidly in both Western and Third World
comparative analysis. From this base Arend Lijphart went on to develop
contrasting majoritarian and consensual models more widely applicable to
all established democratic countries. This article examines the general
conditions favorable to consensual rather than adversarial politics, and
then briefly surveys six selected countries that exemplify consensual
elements in greater or lesser degree. Its conclusion poses the question
whether consensual politics is better visualized as a coherent model or as
a series of devices and practices that can be employed piecemeal in many
situations.

Introduction

Some of the topics covered in this issue offer rather clearcut choices. In spite
few deviant cases, it is usually not difficult to decide whether a political syste
parliamentary or presidential, unitary or federal, and uses-or does not use-s
form of proportional representation at elections. Analysis can then proceed fr
there. Other topics may seem more nebulous, requiring the construction of sca
rankings, and estimates depending on how one elects to approach the problem
comparison. The present article focuses on different styles and procedures f
democratic decision-making, and it offers us a choice of approaches, dependin
how narrowly or broadly we wish to view the decision-making process.
At a first and most specific level, one can analyze the formal requirements
decision-making in key political and legal institutions. Typical examples wou
include various procedures: for reaching executive decisions; for passing a law;

0192-5121 (1997/03) 18:3, 279-17 ? 1997 International Political Science Association

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

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280 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

protecting geographical regions, or religious or ethnolinguistic minorities; for

challenging a law in the courts; and so on. At this same level, one can observe differ-
ences between legal norms and daily practice, since practice can diverge from
formal norms either by under-enforcement of formal requirements (e.g., of
language laws) or by additional requirements based on custom (e.g., conventions
concerning representativeness of cabinets). By focusing mainly on comparisons of
formal requirements, Arend Lijphart (1984) has produced an elegant contrastive
model of majoritarian and consensual systems for 21 democratic systems that will
be examined more fully below.
At a second level, one can look in each country at the decision-making process
and its norms in a much wider sense, taking the entire organization of society and
its patterns of social action as the object for study. This wider canvas includes not
only the central political arena but also local politics, citizen assemblies, decision-
making patterns in industrial relations, in religious and cultural organizations, and
so on. In this wider spectrum of decision-making, one may look for evidence of
congruence or noncongruence among different sectors, and also compare degrees
of congruence from one country to another. This second approach entails both risks
and benefits. The risks include a loss of clarity, and the possibility of greater subjec-
tivity in selecting from a wider range of evidence. The benefits include the proba-
bility of a deeper understanding of the broader political culture, and of knowing
whether it exhibits evidence of system-wide patterns. This approach also permits
us to assess for each case just how much decision-making is managed through
channels outside the formal public sector.
The terminology for this topic has varied from one author to another, and
beneath the differences in words are differences in the way that the issue has been
conceptualized and democratic regimes classified. It is obvious that all systems of
representative democracy are adversarial to some degree at certain points, for
example at elections. Similarly, all are consensus-seeking at some level, because all
democratic systems require a threshold of legitimacy in order to survive. For greater
precision, some authors have preferred to label adversarial regimes as "majoritar-
ian," while others have found this too restrictive and have preferred the term
"competitive." On the other side, authors have differed considerably in defining and
delimiting which regimes are consensual. Some democratic regimes are more
obviously and thoroughly consensual than others, and the causes and consequences
of consensual practices differ strikingly in different cases.
My intent at this stage is to leave questions of definition and terminology open,
on the simple calculation that to follow a single path at this point is to close off
other avenues of inquiry. As a consequence of this choice we may lose some preci-
sion of analysis-particularly concerning marginal or intermediate cases-but we
profit from a broader understanding that different approaches are plausible and
may yield different (and possibly incompatible) results. As the next section will
suggest, the terminology has evolved as the debate unfolds, and as emphasis has
shifted among the countries under study.

History of the Question: Evolution of an Idea

To study this topic more fully, we may follow a research strategy proposed by
Aristotle: to begin by considering something in its first origins, and then follow its
growth and development. For this purpose it is unnecessary to begin from Aristotle.
This topic has specific origins, effectively in the 1950s and 1960s, when comparative

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 KENNETH D. McRAE 281

politics was beginning to categorize systematically the different types of democratic

regime. For a generation that still recalled grave challenges to parliamentary
regimes in the 1930s, a central concern was how to maintain democratic stability.
This was often interpreted as, and measured by, the stability of ministries or
cabinets, a factor which later research has shown to be rather imperfectly correlated
with the stability of regimes or even with continuities of public policy.
One of the influential figures in this debate over stability was Gabriel Almond,
who contended in one key article of 1956 that stability is linked with political culture
and social structure. In support of this linkage, he developed a tripartite typology
of democratic regimes that contrasted a stable, culturally homogeneous group,
exemplified by the Anglo-American democracies, with a less stable, culturally
fragmented group, exemplified by the main continental European systems, plus a
third group of smaller European systems that "combine some of the features" and
"stand somewhere in between" the two other democratic categories (Almond, 1956:
392-393, 405). In subsequent writings, Almond worked towards a basically dichoto-
mous model and sought ways in which to fit cases from the rather awkward
unexplained third group into one or other of his two main original categories
(Lijphart, 1968b: 10-18; 1969: 208-212). These smaller European democracies, it
may be noted, were at this point a rarely visited, sketchily documented terra incog-
nita for most students of comparative politics.
In the 1960s the influence of the Almond model was pervasive, to the point of
ignoring or bending empirical evidence to the contrary. "Your country," declared
one comparativist to the Dutch political scientist Hans Daalder, "theoretically
cannot exist" (Daalder, 1974: 607). The Netherlands, however, not only existed but
stood out as a clear example of a system that combined political stability with an
undisputedly fragmented social structure, a persistent exception to any simple
dichotomous typology. This paradox of the mid-1960s became the starting point for
Arend Lijphart to examine more closely the working of democracy in The
Netherlands and to lay f6undations for a new category that would better explain
the presence of political stability in at least some of the cases comprising Almond's
original, loosely defined third category. Lijphart's study of accommodation among
top-level elites in Dutch politics, published in 1968, quickly became a classic and
led almost simultaneously to similar studies of several other countries.
At the World Congress of the International Political Science Association held at
Brussels in 1967, two papers heralded the arrival of the new way of thinking.
Working independently of each other and drawing on previous work targeted at
different countries, two authors challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of a direct
linkage between democratic stability and current social structure. Gerhard
Lehmbruch, who had just completed a monograph on decision-making in Switzerland
and Austria (1967), presented a paper discussing "systems in which political groups
like to settle their conflicts by negotiated agreements among all the relevant actors,
the majority principle being applicable in fairly limited domains only" (1974: 91).
Arend Lijphart, whose book on The Netherlands had not yet been published, deliv-
ered a long paper that reviewed existing literature on classification of political
systems and proposed a new category for the few apparently deviant cases that exhib-
ited both high social fragmentation and governmental stability (1968a, 1968b).
Lehmbruch referred to the practices he describes as "concordant democracy"
(Konkordanzdemokratie), and also as "proportional democracy" (Proporzdemokratie), while
Lijphart proposed the term "consociational democracy." This terminology marked a
starting point for serious comparative study of consensual democratic systems. While

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282 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

consensus as such is by no means a new idea in Western political thought, its earlier
manifestations usually occurred in settings that preceded political democracy or
mass politics.
There was a more fundamental difference than terminology between the
approaches of Lijphart and Lehmbruch. The latter found the roots of accommoda-
tive politics in the historical political culture of the societies that he investigated,
a product of long developmental processes of the countries concerned. This view
was also shared by Hans Daalder, who saw both Switzerland and The Netherlands
as historically predisposed towards consociational politics as a result of "older tradi-
tions of elite accommodation" (Daalder, 1971). Lijphart, on the other hand, found
the sources of accommodative behavior primarily in the ability and willingness of
political elites to formulate compromises acceptable to the adherents of their
respective subcultures (McRae, 1990: 94-95). The difference was important. It
meant that consociational politics could be flexible, transferable, and potentially
exportable to newly independent countries that faced dangerously high levels of
tribal, religious, or other forms of subcultural conflict.
A third scholar whose work contributed to the early development of the new
concept was the American historian Val Lorwin, who analyzed in some depth the
phenomenon of religious and ideological segmentation in Belgium, The
Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland. Drawing on a widespread knowledge of
European socialist and Catholic labor movements, Lorwin examined the social
forces and organizational patterns that had led to the development, preservation,
and eventually the decline of distinct Catholic or Protestant, secular liberal, or
socialist subcultures in these countries (Lorwin, 1971). The key articles of these
three progenitors of the new way of thinking, Lehmbruch, Lijphart, and Lorwin,
together with other articles on the politics and social structures of these countries,
were assembled in Consociational Democracy, a collection of readings that illustrates
the components of this formative phase of the "consociational school" (McRae,
1974).
Once enunciated, the concept of consociational or "proportional" democracy
spread rapidly. Because of its promise for many newly independent countries,
Lijphart's advocacy of building deliberate, purposive cooperation among the subcul-
tural elites of these countries, as an alternative to more forceful strategies of
integration, attracted much attention, though not without debate and skepticism
on the part of critics. Against these critics, Lijphart argued unflinchingly for
attempting consociational solutions even in the most unfavorable circumstances, on
the main ground that where consociationalism is unlikely to succeed, majoritarian
solutions stand even less chance of success.
The high point of this phase of consociationalism is represented by Lijphart's
Democracy in Plural Societies, published in 1977, a work that reviews the features and
devices of established consociational systems, the social and political conditions that
favor such systems, and the mixed pattern of success and failure in various attempts
to develop consociational systems, or specific consociational devices, in the Third
World. This book gives special attention to the post-colonial experience of former
dependencies of two leading consociational countries, Belgium and The
Netherlands, to see whether the colonial legacy from these countries has been
different. Another chapter deals with consociational elements in nonconsociational
democracies, including overviews of two countries (Canada and Israel) that the
author cautiously classified as "semiconsociational." This chapter marks a first step
towards examining consensual regimes more generally.

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 KENNETH D. McRAE 283

After the appearance of Politics in Plural Societies, Lijphart turned more system
atically to the comparative analysis of democracy in general. The result was a stud
published in 1984 under the title Democracies, which analyzed selected variables i
21 countries that had had continuously stable democratic regimes from 1945 to 1980
and were also large enough for statistical analysis. The central aim of this book wa
to investigate contrasting patterns of democratic government and to relate these t
social systems. The result was an elaboration of two distinct models of democracy
a majoritarian or "Westminster" model, best exemplified by the United Kingdom
or New Zealand, and a consensus model, best exemplified by Switzerland or
Belgium. The contrasting characteristics of these two models will be listed in the
next section as a starting point for further analysis.
Lehmbruch also built upon his earlier work on "concordant" or "proportional"
democracy, though his later writings in English adopted the increasingly popular
term "consociational democracy." His later work moved in two directions: (1) the
conditions faced by consociational democracies in international relations; and (2
the relationships between consociational political systems and systems of economi
representation and decision-making known as liberal corporatism or neocorporatism
(Lehmbruch, 1975; Schmitter and Lehmbruch, 1979). The spreading concept of
liberal corporatism opened up an entire new range of consensual practices in th
world of work, industrial relations, and incomes policy, a development that woul
have implications for important areas of public policy and political decision-making,
but for considerations of space these developments will not be separately followe
up here.

Lijphart's TWo Models

In two introductory chapters of Democracies (1984: chaps. 1, 2), Lijphart identifies
nine and eight main characteristics respectively of his majoritarian and consensual
models. These may be concisely listed and compared as follows:
1. The majoritarian model posits one-party executive power in cabinets
which command a majority of parliamentary seats; the consensual model
shares executive power among all important parties in parliament, prefer-
ably in a broad coalition government.
2. The majoritarian model supposes cabinet control of parliament and a
fusion of executive-legislative authority; the consensual model is marked
by separation of executive and legislative authority or by coalition cabinets
whose fate is often in the hands of the parliamentary parties.
3. The majoritarian model leans to asymmetrical bicameralism and legisla-
tive dominance by the lower house; the consensual model gives more
powers to the second chamber or upper house, and typically uses it to
protect minority interests of one kind or another.
4. The majoritarian model prefers and works towards a two-party system;
the consensual model is open to multiparty politics (though some
countries establish a threshold for parliamentary representation of small
parties).
5. The majoritarian model presupposes a one-dimensional party system
along a left-right axis; the consensual model accepts the possibility of
multiple cleavages in society and a multidimensional party system to
reflect them.

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284 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

6. The majoritarian model prefers elections in single-member constituencies

by the plurality method; the consensual model uses some form of propor-
tional representation to achieve more faithful representation of voter
preferences.
7. The majoritarian model assumes a unitary, uniform, centralized system
of government; the consensual model often provides autonomous areas for
minority interests through federalism or decentralization of authority.
8. The majoritarian model is built on comprehensive parliamentary
sovereignty, and hence does not require a written constitution; the consen-
sual model requires a written constitution, amendable only by some form
of special procedure, as a means of minority protection against undiluted
majority rule.
9. Lijphart's ninth characteristic of the majoritarian or "Westminster"
model is that purely representative systems are not favorable to direct
democracy, and hence resort to referenda sparingly. As his later analysis
shows, however, this is not really a distinguishing feature from consensual
systems as a group, because these also are based on representative
systems. The major deviant example here is Switzerland, which in the
period examined held more than twice as many federal referenda as the
other 20 countries combined (1984: 30-32, 201-204).

The two models developed in this fashion are of course ideal types. There are no
pure cases of the models in the real world, nor is there any reason-other than the
convenience of academics and their students-why there should be. Lijphart himself
lists several discrepancies between the majoritarian model and its nearest examples
in the world of existing democracies, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. For
the United Kingdom, he notes minority Labour cabinets and periods of fragile
majorities in the House of Commons; small third parties (Liberals, Social
Democrats); ethnic nationalism in Scotland and Wales and discussion of devolution
of power to those countries; and the Northern Ireland question, with its regional
parliament for Ulster and experiments with proportional representation. Deviations
of a different sort surfaced after Britain's entry into the European Community in
1973, because the Community thereby acquired the power to legislate directly in
certain policy areas and to challenge British laws in the European Court (1984:
9-16).
For New Zealand, a small, socially homogeneous society, the deviations from the
pure model were even smaller. This country has had a unicameral parliament since
1950, and it made greater-than-average use of referenda between 1945 and 1980.
Neither of these characteristics could be seen as a major departure from the model.
More significantly, New Zealand provided separate parliamentary representation
for its Maori minority in four (later five) larger territorial districts, with a separate
voting register for Maori electors in these constituencies (Lijphart, 1984: 16-20;
McLeay, 1980). For both Britain and New Zealand, most of these deviations from
the formal model could be seen as marginal rather than central elements of the
political system, although some would contend that Britain's accession to the
European Community (later the European Union) represented a surrender of the
sovereignty of Parliament in areas covered by the treaties of accession.'
Lijphart illustrates the eight features of the consensual model with examples
from Switzerland and Belgium. Yet it is clear even at a superficial level that these
two countries approach questions of minority protection in different ways and in

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 KENNETH D. McRAE 285

different contexts. Lijphart's examples may thus imply that there is no single,
coherent model of consensual democracy. As he himself notes in the preface to
Democracies, "I start out with an analysis of the majoritarian model, from which I
derive the consensus model as its logical opposite" (1984: xiv). This procedure does
not guarantee a coherent countermodel. In this sense his consensual "model" differs
significantly from the more tightly knit model of consociational democracy in his
earlier writings.
Consensual devices, practices, and customs can therefore be found in a wide
variety of situations. They depend upon the nature of the protection sought and the
most promising strategies for achieving it. In my analysis that follows, therefore, I
shall retain Lijphart's two pairs of cases that he selects to typify his two models,
but I shall also draw illustrations from countries such as Canada and Finland that
can be ranked somewhere between majoritarian and consensual systems. While
Lijphart sometimes refers to a "majoritarian-consensual continuum," he also note
in his concluding chapter: "The majoritarian model approximates a constitutional
blueprint, whereas the consensus model merely supplies the general principles on
which constitutional provisions can be based but which entail a number of furthe
choices that have to be made" (1984: 32-33, 210). In my own analysis I shall
examine later whether or not the two models should be visualized along a single
linear dimension or continuum.

Sources of Consensual Politics

The limitation of Arend Lijphart's two models, as he develops them in De

is that they are in large part descriptive and static. With minor except
analysis refers mainly to the period from 1945 to 1980, and his primary
with how these democracies function-in law and in practice-rather than
have developed. From these cases and their patterns of societal pluralism
ops both rational and empirical indicators for deciding when consensual d
to be recommended. This is of course consistent with Lijphart's long-held
in plural societies the most significant variable is the capacity and willin
the various segmental elites to act rationally and produce compromise
acceptable to their communities. In his view, such behavior is not confined by
or place, or environmental circumstances.
However, other authors who have analyzed consociational or consensual
including Lehmbruch, Daalder, Lorwin, and many authors of single-country s
have paid closer attention to developmental factors. Practically all of the
racies analyzed by Lijphart, with the possible exception of Israel and Japa
long developmental history of representative and democratic governmen
from about 100 years to several centuries. These developmental patterns
opportunity to take a longer view, and to add some sort of dynamic dim
the analysis.
My own working hypothesis is that consensual systems or devices develop primar-
ily from three types of situation: (1) a long-term growth of consensual practices and
attitudes that become embedded in the political culture, often prior to the arrival
of mass politics, and incorporated gradually in formal institutions; (2) an institu-
tional, legal, or constitutional compromise or package arrived at through inter-elite
negotiation and bargaining, to establish a workable regime or to resolve a specific
problem or deadlock; (3) an external environment, whether of short or long
duration, that is sufficiently threatening to require domestic political groups to

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286 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

compromise or set aside internal divisions in order to assure the independence or

survival of the system itself.
These are not, of course, watertight compartments. We can expect to find
overlapping combinations of these three categories and cumulative reinforcement
of the consensual characteristics of the regime. But consensual practices and behav-
ior undoubtedly can develop, as Lijphart has frequently pointed out, without a prior
consensus-oriented political culture if other conditions are sufficiently favorable.
Further, consensual devices or practices may occur in otherwise majoritarian
regimes when circumstances require it. One of the clearest examples is territorial
federalism in systems that are adversarial in other respects. Similarly, consensual
systems can develop weaknesses that require repair through more adversarial
means. Such devices may lack congruency with other parts of a political system, but
they may be functional for that system if they help to resolve a specific problem.
Of the 21 democracies considered by Lijphart, Switzerland and The Netherlands
are probably the best examples of long-term, slowly evolving political cultures toler-
ant of societal differences. Daalder (1971) gives a perceptive summary of the
relevant long-range factors: their common geopolitical position on the fringes of the
Holy Roman (i.e., German) Empire; the historical absence of any strong centraliz-
ing tradition; their economic focus on mercantile cities and trade routes; the persis-
tence of "ancient pluralism" in new forms in modernized pluralist societies; and
successful accommodation of religious diversity. The Netherlands shares some
aspects of the heritage of the Low Countries with Belgium, but Belgian experience
has also been shaped by periods of Spanish and Austrian dynastic power, Jacobin
democracy, and strong anti-Orangist traditions after separation from the United
Netherlands in 1830. As a result, the sources of Belgian political culture are more
varied.
In a broader European context, the former Imperial lands seem more receptive
to a continuing pluralist political culture than the countries that experienced
centralizing national monarchies (England, Scotland, France, Spain), and especially
those areas of the Empire that escaped later monarchical centralization under
Austria or Prussia. For the Imperial lands in central Europe there was an institu-
tional base for this in the religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which established
the geographic separation of Roman Catholics and Lutherans (cujus regio, ejus religio)
in a pattern that still marked Germany until well into the twentieth century. A
second pattern of long-term religious segmentation-this one nonterritorial-can
be seen in some successor states to the Ottoman Empire, where it appears, among
other examples, in the social and legal organization of Israeli democracy.
Regarding the second category, the idea of a package or agreement as a founda-
tion for a society or regime has a long and honorable history in pre-democratic
liberal thought, under the generic label of social contract theory. While classical
liberal theory envisions a hypothetical original compact to establish a society or set
up a form of government or both (in double-contract theorists), most modern,
historically documented cases of pacts or agreements have been negotiated among
elites of rival factions, parties, social classes, or religious or ethnolinguistic groups.
A far-reaching example is the previously mentioned Peace of Augsburg, which was
confirmed and expanded at the end of the Thirty Years War in the Treaty of
Westphalia of 1648.
In more recent times there are many examples of pacts or agreements to estab-
lish a regime or to resolve a crisis by negotiated agreements among the contend-
ing parties. Lijphart's original study of political accommodation in The Netherlands

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 KENNETH D. McRAE 287

focused on the Pacificatie of 1917, accomplished by a small neutral power at the

height of World War I. The Swiss federal constitution-makers of 1848 successfully
reconciled Protestant and Catholic cantons in the wake of a brief civil war over the
Catholic Sonderbund in 1847. In the 1840s Canadian leaders from Upper and Lower
Canada cooperated to make workable the British-imposed Act of Union of 1840,
and when this regime broke down in deadlock in the 1860s a wider grouping of
party leaders combined to devise the federation of 1867.
American history has further examples. A key compromise at the Federal
Convention of 1787, allowing southern states to count their slave populations at 60
percent of actual numbers for purposes of representation and direct taxation,
overcame a critical division between northern and southern delegates and made a
federal union possible. The Missouri Compromise of 1821, admitting Missouri as a
slave state but barring slavery from all the remaining territory of the Louisiana
Purchase, allowed four further decades of North-South cultural coexistence until
the system collapsed under increasing strains in the late 1850s, resulting in a costly
war. The Civil War effectively put an end to various states' rights theories, reduced
the power of state governments, and left the United States a more majoritarian
society.
The third source of consensual practices is a threatening external environment.
The threat may be of either short or long duration. Among the short-term sources
are coalition governments in wartime or in other crises. A well-known example is
the Conservative-Labour coalition led by Winston Churchill from 1940 to 1945 in
the United Kingdom, the very archetype of the majoritarian model. In Finland,
where coalition government was already the norm, the war years from 1941 to 1943
saw an all-party coalition that included even Finland's fascist party (IKL). Austria
resorted to broad Catholic-Socialist coalitions after 1945 in order to surmount the
difficulties of the Allied four-power military occupation and establish legitimacy for
the Second Republic. This practice continued for 21 years, to be succeeded after
1966 by alternating majority governments at federal level that nevertheless largely
adhered to earlier practices of proportionality and consociational politics as
accepted rules of the game (Pulzer, 1969).
Some countries have faced hostile external environments on a longer-term basis.
Finland has experienced such a situation intermittently ever since its separation
from Sweden in 1809, both as a Grand Duchy under the Russian tsars and after
independence in 1917 as a neighbor of the Soviet Union. The proximity of a large
and powerful neighbor has left a persistent and complex imprint on Finland's polit-
ical institutions, political behavior, and collective mentality. Israeli democracy,
surrounded from its foundation by hostile neighboring states, has also been largely
shaped in response to external forces.

Four Systems Considered

I have noted above that when Lijphart developed his majoritarian model of democ-
racy, he also mentioned specific deviations from it in the two countries closest to
the model, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. What remains to be explored is
whether we can treat the alternative consensual model in the same way, an exercise
that Lijphart did not pursue. This section will therefore examine Lijphart's two
major consensual examples, Switzerland and Belgium, for both consensual and
nonconsensual elements. To these will be added two further examples in which
neither adversarial nor consensual features are so clearly predominant, Finland and

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288 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

Canada. These four additional cases should be visualized not as abstract models but
as integrated, working political systems that reflect the complexities of the real
world. Because of space limits, however, these profiles must be brief. I am looking
for the operational mainsprings of each system. For more rounded, comprehensive
portraits, one may consult full-length country studies of Switzerland, Belgium, and
Finland (McRae, 1983, 1986, and forthcoming 1997).
In Switzerland, a central feature of the system is proporz, or proportional fairness,
as Lehmbruch has emphasized. It applies in a double sense, at the levels both of
distributional fairness and of political, administrative, or judicial representation.
The "magic-formula," four-party federal executive, with proportions unchanged
since 1959, is perhaps the best-known feature of this form of power-sharing.2 Even
more widely known is Switzerland's decentralized federalism, which allows many
federal laws to be administered by the cantons according to their priorities and also
leaves residual legislative power to the cantons.
The cantons show similar patterns of proporz and multiparty executives, even in
those where a single party may control a majority of seats in the cantonal legisla-
ture, though a few small cantons still practice direct democracy through annual
citizen assemblies or Landsgemeinden. Swiss federalism is also close-knit between
levels of government. The cumul des mandats allows cantonal and communal politi-
cians to sit concurrently in the federal parliament, a practice that on balance
promotes intergovernmental cooperation rather than confrontation.
The origins of consensual attitudes in long-term political culture have produced
Swiss leaders with finely honed skills in the early detection and mediation of subcul-
tural conflicts. Though not universal, these skills can be documented at many points
since the Treaty of Stans in 1481. Five centuries of accommodative leadership have
given Swiss pluralist values the status of a treasured national asset, and while one
might doubt the depth of this sentiment in popular culture, there are few Swiss
who would openly attack it.
The chief "nonconsensual" device that many scholars have seen in Swiss politics
is the referendum and its forms of direct democracy. However, Swiss referenda are
of different kinds. Those for constitutional amendments, including those resulting
from citizen initiatives, require a double majority of total voters and voters in a
majority of cantons, thus affording a degree of minority protection. Referenda
resulting from challenges to parliamentary legislation, as well as citizen-inspired
constitutional initiatives, represent a safety valve, a remedy for too much inter-elite
consensus in a system that lacks a viable alternative government. As such, they can
offset legislative mistakes or omissions, and can thus be beneficial for the function-
ing of the system.
In Belgium, periods of Liberal and Catholic one-party hegemony in the
nineteenth century ended with the rise of a third Socialist pillar after franchise
reform in 1893. Belgian social structure then became highly segmented into three
distinct pillars orfamilies spirituelles, making coalition government the usual form.
Flemish language aspirations, beginning as a quest for individual language rights
in the 1850s, went on to become a drive for regional priority and even territorial
exclusivity for Dutch in Flanders in the 1920s and 1930s. In the process, the strongly
unitary Belgian state of the nineteenth century was reoriented gradually towards
federalism after 1965. In the 1990s this federalization is not quite complete, but
the quest for language accommodation has been under way for more than a century.
Its achievement, through long and often bitter debate and negotiation, represents
a considerable triumph for consensual-and consociational-politics.

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 KENNETH D. McRAE 289

The new-model federalism of Belgium defies simple description. Essentially, it is

an asymmetrical double federalism of Byzantine complexity, which devolves listed
powers in two layers from the central government to three cultural communities
(Dutch-speaking, French-speaking, and German-speaking) and three nonmatching
economic regions (Flanders, Wallonie, and Brussels-Capital). The two layers also
function asymmetrically. There are counterbalanced minorities of Flemish Socialists
and Walloon Catholics, of Flemings in Brussels and Francophones in Belgium as a
whole, and a central aim of the system is to protect these minorities through the
negotiating strength of the corresponding majority groups elsewhere in the system.
Under the tensions accompanying constitutional reform in the 1970s, each of the
three traditional parties was split into separate language-based parties, and these
functioned alongside three regional parties whose drive for regionalization had
helped to force linguistic splits in the traditional parties.
The means for assuring the various forms of minority protection under the new
institutions are numerous: devices for guaranteed linguistic parity in the cabinet,
in the top-level public service, in parliamentary committees, and in broadcasting;
proportionality in funding and fair representation in the public service and public
corporations, the diplomatic corps, higher education and scientific research; "alarm-
bell" procedures to protect linguistic minorities in parliament or in Brussels-
Capital, and ideological minorities in the new community councils; measures to
assure cultural autonomy in broadcasting and education, including the splitting of
bilingual universities into separate, officially unilingual institutions. This list could
be lengthened, but the key principles remain parity at the top, fair representation
at lower levels, and community autonomy wherever feasible.
Because the language laws and constitutional reform have met prolonged and
stiff resistance from supporters of the former unitary system, Belgium has invested
heavily in control agencies and enforcement mechanisms to assure compliance with
policies that ultimately derive their strongest support from the Flemish majority.
The paradox is that policies of power-sharing and cultural autonomy, worked out
by arduous negotiation in the central parliament, seem to require the continuing
authority of that parliament to give legitimacy to enforcement agencies. Belgian
political culture, like the Swiss, recognizes the need for patient negotiation and
finding a mean (middelmatisme), but unlike the Swiss version it tends to view the
resulting consensus less positively, not as a civic virtue but as a necessary evil.
In Finland, the political system was strongly influenced by external forces both
before and after 1917, but for half a century after independence domestic politics
was acutely adversarial. These years brought three disastrous wars, a renewed
second wave of language conflict, and continuous bitter ideological divisions
stemming from the Red-White civil war of 1918 that accompanied the struggle for
independence. This period saw the outright banning of communism from 1930 to
1944, the outlawing of fascist parties and rightist organizations at Soviet insistence
after 1944, and the exclusion of communists from cabinet posts for 18 years from
1948 to 1966 as a precaution against an apprehended coup d'etat. To the extent
that the constitution permitted, majoritarian politics predominated.
The later 1960s brought a more consensual climate and a trend to broader coali-
tions. The communists were readmitted to government in 1966, the conservatives-
after four decades of almost total exclusion-in 1987. Cabinets became more durable.
In 66 years from 1917 to 1983 Finland had 62 governments, but the next 12 years
saw only three, each of which lasted a full four-year parliamentary term. The most
recent coalitions have also spanned a wider ideological range: the five-party "rainbow"

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290 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

coalition formed in 1995 grouped conservatives, communists, and one Green Party
minister in the same cabinet. In industrial relations and incomes policy, there has
been a parallel evolution from hard-line militancy to highly institutionalized negoti-
ation involving all major economic interest groups, with the result that Finland since
the 1960s has moved visibly closer to a Scandinavian model of government through
widespread consultation and consensus (Helander and Anckar, 1983; Elder, Thomas,
and Arter, 1988).
The institutional framework for parliamentary democracy under the 1919
Constitution is interesting for two special features. First, Finland has fluctuated
between presidential government and a more parliamentary system, depending on
the salience of foreign policy issues-where the president carries special powers and
responsibilities-and the temperament of presidential incumbents. Presidential
power was carried to great heights during Urho Kekkonen's 25 years in office, but
since 1981 it has receded under his two lower-key successors. Second, special-major-
ity procedures in parliament were specified not only for constitutional amendments
but for some categories of taxation and economic measures that are considered to
infringe constitutionally protected property rights of citizens. These required either
a two-thirds or a five-sixths majority of votes cast, depending on the procedure used.
Further, even ordinary laws passed by simple majority could be deferred until after
the next election by a vote of one-third of the members, a striking provision for a
temporary minority veto. These procedures rewarded consensual behavior and made
a minimum-majority coalition less valuable than a broader one (Arter, 1984:
262-280; Anckar, 1988). Somewhat ironically, they are being phased out in the
1990s as Finland adjusts to its new membership in the European Union.
In Canada, the federal parliament at first sight looks quite similar to the
Westminster model of the United Kingdom or New Zealand. The electoral system
is based on single-member constituencies, and hence gives bonuses-sometimes
enormous ones-to parties that have a plurality either nationally or in a specific
region. There is an expectation of one-party cabinets that control a majority in the
House of Commons, and an aversion to formal coalitions when no party wins a
majority. The second chamber is weak, resting on appointment rather than election,
and it originally represented not the provinces of the federation but the three (later
four) geographical regions of the country. Much the same Westminster model
appears in the 10 provincial governments. While the two-party system remains the
normative model at both federal and provincial levels, the caprices of the electoral
system have produced either one-party landslides or three-party (or even four-party)
situations on many occasions. Some smaller provinces have seen an occasional sweep
of all seats by a single party.
Canada, however, is a federation, and federations require a division of powers, a
written constitution, and in most cases judicial review, all considered to be consen-
sual devices to protect minority interests of one kind or another. This being said,
one may argue that Canadian federalism operates in a more adversarial fashion
than Swiss federalism. In Canada there are separate sets of legislators at federal
and provincial levels, and some provinces have separate federal and provincial party
organizations. There are separate federal and provincial bureaucracies, with areas
of overlap and rivalry. During chronic constitutional impasse and conflict since the
late 1960s, there has been an increased resort to federal-provincial "executive
federalism" through regular meetings of first ministers to resolve intergovernmen-
tal differences. Increasing public reaction against this practice led some provinces
to require a provincial referendum on any projected constitutional amendment, but

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 KENNETH D. McRAE 291

this has made significant constitutional amendment all but unattainable. While
federalism is normally a consensual device, some federal systems clearly operate in
more consensual fashion than others.
The constitutional changes of 1982 included a comprehensive Charter of Rights,
containing important human rights guarantees that restricted the powers of all
levels of government in Canada. This had the effect of removing a wide range of
issues from the political arena of negotiation and compromise to one of authorita-
tive determination by the judiciary. Since the best-known and most widely cited
external model for Canada is the United States, the Charter has clearly increased
the propensity of Canadians to contest human rights issues through American-style
litigation.
On closer examination, the Canadian federal system illustrates the working of
what Lijphart has termed incongruent federalism, that is, a federation in which the
component units differ from one another and from the federation as a whole in
their social and cultural characteristics (1984: 179-180). These differences have led
different provinces to develop differing forms of accommodation for religious and
linguistic minorities. Concerning religion, most provinces provide separate public
education systems for Catholics and non-Catholics, through parallel, separately run
school systems at the local level. Concerning language, Quebec was created in 1867
with guarantees and expectations of ethnocultural dualism, but since the 1960s it
has increasingly moved towards official unilingualism. Manitoba entered the
Confederation in 1871 with institutions to accommodate religious and linguistic
dualism on the model of Quebec, but all this was swept away by the 1890s owing
to the pressure of advancing English-speaking settlement. New Brunswick has
moved in the opposite direction, from English unilingualism before the 1960s to
official bilingualism and formal recognition of cultural duality in the 1980s. These
examples are a reminder that consensual behavior may vary from one time period
to another and from one region to another, even within a single political regime.
These sketches of Switzerland, Belgium, Finland, and Canada touch only the
highlights of these four political systems. They are not systematic, and cannot be
made so in such a limited space. They can, however, be improved and regularized
somewhat if we place them in a framework of the eight elements of Lijphart's
consensus model. This is done in Table 1, which for contrast also includes Lijphart's
two preferred examples of majoritarian democracy, New Zealand and the United
Kingdom. In this table Lijphart's list of elements is represented by the first nine
points, which include separate listings for territorial and nonterritorial federalism
(7 and 8). To these I have added the idea of limited government backed by a charter
of rights (10), because these generally aim to protect all citizens including minor-
ity groups, whether as individuals or in collectivities. The remaining four categories
(11-14) list a few specialized or unusual arrangements that emerge from a closer
look at the six countries in the table.
The classifications in Table 1 are rather crude and also tentative. Some require
qualification, and some would be better represented as scales than as simple "yes"
or "no" alternatives. Nevertheless, the main aim is to illustrate the method and
assess the broad incidence of consensual devices and practices. What the table
perhaps fails to represent fully is the pattern of the underlying political cultures,
which could be measured more directly by appropriate survey research. Among the
added dimensions that Lijphart does not include, the notion of territorial special
status occurs in only one of these six cases, but other examples occur elsewhere,
including Greenland and the Faroe Islands (Denmark), Catalonia (Spain), or the

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292 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

TABLE 1. Consensual Elements in Six Selected Democracies.

Feature Switzerland Belgium Finland Canada NZ UK

1. Executive-level Yes Yes Yes No No No

powersharing
2. Separation of powersa Yes No Yes No No No
3 Balanced bicameralismb Yes Yes N/A No N/A No
4. Multiparty systemc Yes Yes Yes No No No
5. Multidimensional Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
party systemd
6. Proportional Yes Yes Yes No No No
representation
in elections
7. Territorial federalism Yes Yes No Yes No No
8. Nonterritorial No Yes No Yes No No
federalisme
9. Written constitution Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
with possible minority
veto

10. Limited government, No No Yes Yes No No

charter of rights
11. Special procedures Yes Yes Yes Yes No No
available in legislative
processf
12. Separate minority No No Yes No Yes No
electoral registersg
13. Non-official No No Yes Yes No No
representative bodiesh
14. Territorial special No No Yes No No No
statusi

aPartial separation in Finland.

b Unicameral parliaments in Finland and
c Excludes minor or regional parties in C
d Excludes small nationalist parties in Un
e Includes community councils (Belgium)
f Includes: referendum challenge to law
deferment motions in Finland; notwiths
g Includes Sami register (Finland) and M
h Includes Svenska Finlands Folkting (F
i Includes Aland islands (Finland).

South Tyrol (Italy). It seems li

racies would add still more dimensions to Table 1 than have been indicated here.

Conclusion: Is There a Consensus Model?

This article has been more exploratory than definitive. Its conclusions will
priately brief. The findings from the selected examples and some further
cast doubt upon the notion of a coherent or integrated consensus mod
stage a better frame for analysis might be represented as a wheel or c
with spokes radiating outwards from a centre, as in Figure 1. These spo
sent various consensual devices, practices, and strategies that offer alternat

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 KENNETH D. MCRAE 293

FIGURE 1. Consensual Devices and Strategies as Variationsfirom the Majoritarian Model.

improvements to a centralized, majority-oriented, integrated model. This is not to

suggest, however, that a centralized model must precede consensual practices
historically. Previous studies show strong evidence to the contrary.
Figure 1 represents mainly a listing of the elements in Table 1, slightly
rearranged to facilitate analysis. If we compare this figure to a clock-face, the upper
right quadrant concerns devices for fair representation and power-sharing in a
central parliament (12 to 3), while the next four categories (4 to 7) concern diffu-
sion of power in the system and possibilities of citizen or group protection against
government. The next two (8 and 9, building on 5 and 7) refer to territorial diffu-
sion, while 10 represents forms of nonterritorial self-government. The figure leaves
one more position (11) for miscellaneous special devices such as those listed above
in Table 1, and this list would undoubtedly grow longer if the study were extended
to the rest of the 21 democracies.
Analytically speaking, one may arrange these elements into groupings and
clusters in a variety of ways. In spatial or geographic terms, the consensual alter-
natives to the unitary majoritarian model are (1) territorially decentralized options;

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294 Contrasting Styles of Democratic Decision-making

(2) corporate federalism or cultural autonomy options; and (3) shared-power options
within the same political arena. Two further dimensions of some importance are (a)
the relative power and resources (demographic, economic, and cultural) of the
groups concerned, and (b) the range-large or small-of matters to be regulated by
consensual methods. These dimensions will not be examined further in this article,
but they constitute a starting point for a more systematic study of policy choices in
various types of plural societies. What also calls for further inquiry is which of these
elements occur normally in clusters, which ones may be normally incompatible with
others (at least with respect to a given group in a given political system), and which
ones are neutral with respect to others. When these patterns have been further
investigated both logically and empirically, we shall understand whether it is better
to view consensual democracy as a coherent integrated model or as a more diverse
collection of devices, procedures, practices, and culturally embedded states of mind.

Notes

1. However, New Zealand's position as the purest example of the Westminster model wa
cast in doubt by the general election of October 1996, held under a new law instituting
proportional representation along German lines. The outcome was a parliament with no
majority party, two months of hard negotiations to form a coalition government, and
formal interparty agreement on policy issues. The new electoral system represents
major departure from the model, but whether the deviation will prove temporary
permanent remains to be seen.
2. After 1959 Switzerland's seven-member Federal Council was chosen on a continuing basi
of two members each for the Radicals, Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, pl
one member for the Swiss People's Party (formerly the Farmers' Party). Further conven
tions assure an appropriate balance in linguistic and regional representation normall
four or five German speakers out of seven, and each of the seven representing a diffe
ent canton.

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Biographical Note

KENNETH D. McRAE is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Carleton University

in Ottawa. He is a past president of the Canadian Political Science Association and
a former research supervisor for the Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism
and Biculturalism. His professional interests focus on comparative politics and
especially plural societies, as well as Western political thought. His most recent
books are three volumes in the five-part project Conflict and Compromise in
Multilingual Societies, dealing with Switzerland (1983), Belgium (1986), and Finlan
(1997). ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, Carleton University, 112
Colonel By Drive, Ottawa K1S 5B6, Canada.

Acknowledgements. This article is based in part on a larger investigation of plural societi

published under the title of Conflict and Compromise in Multilingual Societies (McRae, 1983ff
am grateful for research support from the Killam Programme of the Canada Council an
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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