PoP - Types of Democracy

Lijphart

• Consensus (kinder, gentler, safer) vs Majoritarian (exclusive, competitive, adversarial) democracies

• Measured on 10 variables divided into 2 dimensions

  • Executive parties (joint responsibility): concentration of executive power, executive-legislative relationships, party systems, electoral systems, and interest groups. 

  • Federal-unitary (divided responsibility): centralisation of government, division of legislative power, constitutional rigidity, presence of judicial review, and central bank dependency. 

  • 2 dimensions are supported by factor analysis

• Measurement of government performance via Worldwide Governance Indicators, Macroeconomic management, and control of violence 

  • Results: Consensus democracies perform better under 16/17 measurements (9 of which are statistically significant) 

  • CD have better women’s representation, less inequality, better environmental protections, more generous foreign aid, better voter turnout

  • Executive-parties dimension is more significantly correlated than federal-unitary 

• Starting a consensus democracy faces institutional and cultural resistance. A consensual political culture may also be required

Bogaards

• Newer democracies have lower correlations between features 

• Further research across 100 countries and 70 indicators shows that consensus democracies are correlated with stronger performance

  • Extends research to new democracies, outside western europe, and at subnaitonal levels 

  • Wide range of quantitative analysis: multivariate regression, bivariate, QCA

• Consensus and majoritarian democracies are empirical polar types and normative ideal types 

• Positive traits of consensus democracies were mostly limited to the executive-parties dimension

• Issue: consensus increases educational inequality between migrants and natives and has more extreme right-wing parties 

Qvortrup

• Terrorism response to Bogaards 

• Erodes soundness of Bogaard’s analysis due to overreliance on small N studies

Poloni-Staudinger

• Measures environmental effectiveness with more variables across 23 advanced industrial countries 

  • Lijphart used the Palmer Index which measures CO2 emissions, fertiliser consumption, and deforestation. Also used energy efficiency.

• Factor analysis shows four factors that have mixed correlations with consensus democracies

  • (1) environmentalism (recycling, clean water, etc.), (2) environmental taxation, (3) conservation (land reserves), and (4) nuclear energy production. 

• Consensus democracies have a significant negative correlation with conservation 

  • Likely due to the decentralised decision-making processes

• Federal-unitary dimension of consensus democracies is strongly positively correlated with mundane environmentalism and conservation → federal systems play an important role in environmental policy.

• Mundane environmentalism is the (only) strongest factor positively correlated with consensus democracies across both dimensions 

• Generally, aggregated preferences are believed to be funnelled through institutions to arrive at macro-level outcomes, BUT institutions can constrain possible outcomes → poorer than expected results from consensus democracies

Bogaards 2

• Lijphart and Qvortup claim that fatal terrorist attacks are 6x more likely in majoritarian democracies 

• Recodes terrorism with full dataset

  • Lijphart uses fewer countries and a smaller timeframe

• Shows that consensus democracies have more instances of terrorism 

Manatschal and Bernauer

• Executive parties leads to inclusion, federal unitary leads to exclusion of immigrants in consensus democracies

• Methods: Bayesian regression with the migrant policy index (MIPEX)

• Consensual executive parties and majoritarian federal unitary lead to the highest MIPEX scores 

• Not all immigrants can vote → interests cannot be accounted for

• Migrants are not bound geographically → harder to represent 

Russell

• Interpretations of westminster model are confusing and unclear 

  • Can refer to the british system, countries influenced by britain, or Lijphart’s majoritarian democracies 

• Only 30% of academic publications actually define the westminster model

• Defined differently across publications 

Tsebellis

• Coalition governments produce significantly fewer laws due to greater number of veto players

Strohmeier

• Westminster system has never represented the majoritarian ideal and has moved towards consensus overtime 

• It was strongly majoritarian between 1945 and 1996

Jonsson

• Nordic countries are considered consensual democracies 

  • Development of political culture based on consensus

• Consensus democracy has 2 origins

  • (1) neo-corporatism and (2) heterogeneous European states

• Iceland has a culture of aversion to military, respect for rule of law, and lots of labour market strife 

• Iceland has adversarial politics due to institutional arrangements/practices and cultural tradition of confrontation in political debates

  • Iceland uses filibuster most out of European parliaments 

• Main point: even though Iceland has had consensus institutions, its politics and history are adversarial and led to majoritarian democracy 

Geissel and Michels

• Direct democracy vs. public deliberation is a debate within democracies

• Methods: bivariate analysis of direct democracy and public deliberation with consensus and majoriatrian democracies

• Findings: public deliberation is equally common in consensus and majoritarian democracies 

Lijphart 2

• One typology of western democracies proposed by Almond differentiates by geography

  • Anglo-American, continental European, and scandinavian/low countries 

  • Establishes a relation between political culture and social structure

• Anglo-American democracies are stable and effective due to homogenous and secular political culture

• European democracies are fragmented with many political subcultures. These cross-cutting cleavages force leaders of social groups to adopt moderate positions

• Consociational democracy: government by elite cartel designed to turn a democracy with fragmented political luclture into a stable democracy

  • Distinct cleavage lines are like voluntary apartheid and are conductive to political stability