1 Introduction
The publication of a single-case study monograph on elite accommodation in the Netherlandsâmore than 50 years ago nowâsparked what would become one of the most enduring, contentious and debated research programs in Comparative Politics and International Relations. At the heart of The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands, Arend Lijphart shows how the combination of three factorsâthe joint effort on the part of political leaders from different communities to resolve conflict and maintain peace, the participation of the leaders of all blocs in any such settlement, and the invocation of the principle of proportionality in the substance of the settlementâworked together to facilitate and maintain democracy amid division and pluralism (Lijphart 1968: 111). While he did not apply the term âconsociationalismâ to this mode of governance until subsequent publications, including a World Politics article a year later (Lijphart 1969), Lijphartâs thesis has remained remarkably consistent over 50 years: âcooperation at the elite level could overcome the conflict potential inherent in [âŠ] deep cleavagesâ (2008: 2). Over time, this mode of government began to cohere into precise institutional form to include the concurrent use of grand coalitions, proportionality rules, veto rights and group autonomy provisions (Lijphart 1977). Sharing power between majority and minority groups through these four intersecting institutions, it is claimed, encourages them to govern together with a âspirit of accommodationâ (Lijphart 1968).
Constitutional designers and external conflict mediators have tended to support Lijphartâs starting assumption, seeing power-sharing as a preferred institutional strategy for mediating ethnic, linguistic, religious and national divisions. While consociationalism may have originated as a descriptive device to explain democratic stability in the Netherlandsâand later Switzerland, Austria and Belgiumâit has, beginning in the 1980s and especially since the 1990s, taken a distinctly prescriptive turn. A ânew wave â of consociational casesâoften emerging out of violent conflict and adopted with international mediation supportâappeared across Europe and around the world (Taylor 2009). For those places where conflict ends via negotiation and there are no clear victors, external mediators in particular see some form of power-sharing as being able to reconcile contrasting norms of territorial integrity and self-determination, as enhancing internal and regional security, and as promoting democracy and minority rights (McCulloch and McEvoy 2018). At an empirical level, there appears to be a power-sharing dividend: it supports the end of violent conflict, it reduces group-based insecurities, and it supports minority inclusion in democratic processes.
Not everyone agrees. Indeed, consociationalism remains hotly contested today. These concerns are well-rehearsed elsewhere, but in brief, they follow three main tracks:
- 1.Consociationalism is difficult to adopt: Majorities and minorities will bring divergent institutional preferences to any negotiation on the contours of the state with majority leaders favoring majoritarianism and minority elites preferring consociation and other forms of power-sharing. This inability to agree on what shape the state should take makes consociational settlements âas rare as the arctic roseâ (Horowitz 2002: 197).
- 2.Consociationalism has difficulty functioning: Consociation is often seen as a dysfunctional form of democracy as it brings together disparate and reluctant power-sharing partners, who may be divided not only by ethnicity, nationality, language or religion but also by ideology. This makes the consensus that consociationalists seek very hard to find, with immobilism, legislative deadlock and ethnic outbidding as more likely outcomes.
- 3.Consociationalism is difficult to modify, and even harder to move beyond: Consociation is often seen as âsticky,â that is, by locking in ostensibly divisive identities, it is thought to block the transition to a more ânormalâ majoritarian politics. Parties are either not willing to change a set of rules under which they benefit or, because they have so little in common in terms of how they envision the role of the state, they cannot agree on new institutional arrangements. This implies an inability to reform or exit consociational arrangements.
The ongoing debates over consociation, power-sharing and how to design inclusive political institutions amid deep division thus remain as salient today as they did 50 years ago. We contribute to these debates through the application of a temporal lens on the past, present and future of consociationalism in Europe. With these concerns front of mind, we seek in this volume to query the performance of power-sharing in European states across three dimensions: adoptability, functionality and what we might call end-ability.
2 Power-Sharing from Start to Finish
Consociationalism represents a specific type of power-sharing institutional design. Power-sharing is best employed as an umbrella term to capture âthose rules that, in addition to defining how decisions will be made by groups within the polity, allocate decision-making rights, including access to state resources, among collectivities competing for powerâ (Hartzell and Hoddie 2003: 320). Understood in this way, power-sharing includes not only consociationalism but also federalism, another institutional approach deployed in many of the European cases considered in this volume. Both consociationalism and federalism combine institutions of shared-rule and self-rule, and both can take a variety of institutional forms. The four consociational institutions can be designed either according to a logic of predetermination or self-determination. Predeterminedâor corporateâconsociation âaccommodates groups according to ascriptive criteria, such as ethnicity or religionâ (McGarry and OâLeary 2007: 675), often in the form of ethnic quotas and reserved seats. Self-determinedâor liberalâconsociation ârewards whatever salient political identities emerge in democratic elections, whether these are based on ethnic or religious groups, or on subgroup or transgroup identitiesâ (McGarry and OâLeary 2007: 675). This includes the allocation of executive posts on the basis of partiesâ legislative seat-share, the use of qualified majority rules and opt-in clauses for autonomy provisions.
Federalism, too, can appear in various institutional configurations. Federations vary according to the number and composition of the subunits, the extent of competencies allocated to the subunits versus the amount of power retained by the center, as well as by whether competencies are allocated on a symmetrical or asymmetrical basis. Consociationalism and federalism share a number of conceptual affinities but they remain empirically distinct. Federalism often exists outside the consociational framework, and not all consociations enact federal rules. While our primary focus in this volume is on consociational power-sharing, we also consider the relationship between consociationalism and federalism in our selected cases.
In this volume, we consider how consociationalism is adopted, how it functions and how it ends (McCulloch and McEvoy 2020). To start, we are interested in adoptability. By adoptability, we mean the conditions under which parties agree to share power or come to see power-sharing as an acceptable arrangement for mediating and resolving their collective disputes (McGarry 2017). As noted above and as Paul Anderson and John McGarry show in this volume (see Chaps. 9 and 10 respectively), getting to consociational agreement is no small feat. Beyond the asymmetrical preferences majorities and minorities might bring to the table, adoptability also highlights how agreement on political institutions is only one of many moving parts in a comprehensive settlement. That is, the acceptability of power-sharing institutions is often contingent on the parties agreeing to other conflict-related matters; in Chap. 10, for example, McGarry demonstrates in the case of Cyprus, it is the inability to resolve self-determination and security matters (such as the ongoing presence of Turkish troops on the island) that contributes to holding up reunification efforts. As McGarry notes in his chapter, âit is not just that a consociation may need a comprehensive settlement that involves agreement on multiple disputes, but [it is] how these other disputes are settled [that] will affect the prospects for consociational adoption and maintenance.â To understand why it is that consociation is difficultâbut, it should be stressed, not impossibleâto adopt, we thus need to understand the adoptability of the agreement itself, both in terms of the agreementâs constituent parts as well as the wider environment in which power is to be shared.
We also consider the functionality of the different power-sharing systems in our selected cases. Functionality can be understood as the ability to âget things done,â a vital precondition for any institutional package. As Joanne McEvoy and Eduardo Aboultaif (2020) suggest, âa functional power-sharing system is one that proves useful for its intended purpose, ostensibly to promote elite cooperation, help the state transition to democracy and secure peace.â McGarry employs the term âperformanceâ in similar fashion, defining it as âthe ability of consociations to be adopted, maintained and to secure peaceful stabilityâ (2019: 540). Functionality assumes that power-sharing ins...