Search Results

This chapter reports an association between the electoral rules that have been adopted in a political system and niche party electoral competitiveness. The competitiveness of niche parties is defined by the number of viable niche competitors in a particular country and/or their combined vote share. In a manner similar to Lijphart (1999), scattergrams are presented that depict a relationship between electoral rules, the effective number of parties, and levels of niche party competition in twenty‐seven Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The chapter reports an association between proportional electoral systems and niche party competitiveness.

This chapter combines the conclusions of the previous chapters, and claims that one way in which electoral systems matter for citizen–party linkages is through their influence on niche party competition. It also presents a brief literature review on the effects of electoral systems, and identifies opportunities for future study. Finally, the chapter underlines the normative implications of the book. One implication is that citizens in systems that feature proportional electoral systems are perhaps more satisfied with democracy because they have access to both niche and mainstream pathways of political representation. Nevertheless, the chapter concludes with a generally positive evaluation of the Western European democracies under review on the basis that their citizens have access to at least one, and possibly both niche and mainstream pathways of party representation.

The political studies community in the United Kingdom has traditionally adopted a distinctive and insular approach, in terms of theory and methods, to constitutional research but there is a pressing need to embrace alternative tools of political analysis. This book utilizes Lijphartian political analysis in order to inject a more theoretically driven account of change.

This chapter explores how normative and empirical theories might be successfully combined in order to make informed political decisions in divided societies. First it considers the theory of consociational democracy as elaborated by Arend Lijphart, which is one of the most important approaches to institutional design in divided societies. Although it is primarily empirical, Lijphart's formulation also contains an important normative dimension. The chapter then examines one of the most important normative theories to emerge in recent decades, namely John Rawls's political liberalism. Political liberalism, and especially the account of public reason that it embodies, has had an enormous influence on the development of deliberative democracy. The focus is on how Rawls negotiates a path between a concern for independent justification and a concern for political stability. Central to his approach is an ideal of public justification according to which citizens should look to the kinds of political principles and values that we might normally expect to find implicit in the political culture of a democratic society when justifying collective decisions. It is argued that political liberalism offers a convincing way of thinking about the relation between empirical and normative considerations.

Although deliberative theorists sometimes stress the importance of representation, the participatory political institutions of common property resource regimes cannot be directly transferred to great societies. A good representative system will combine the functions of aggregation and representation. Political equality directly implies proportional representation. Majority voting in the legislature is the counterpart principle. Even when shifting coalitions of parties are decisive according to the rule of the issue-by-issue median, this does not negate a meaningful sense of deliberative rationality. Liberal constitutionalism cannot plausibly be made consistent with the democratic principle and counter-majoritarian institutions are deficient. The public reasoning of representative democracies involves a contest over the warrant of decision premisses and a bargaining to mutual advantage where disagreement persists

The chapter introduces a new database on political-institutional patterns of democracy used in the contributions to the book. It provides an update and extension of Lijphart’s (1999, 2012) measurement of consensus and majoritarian democracy for the countries of the second wave of the CSES during the period 1997–2006, using 11 partly improved indicators. The chapter explores patterns of democracy by the means of factor analysis, construct additive indices, and present the resulting country scores of consensus and majoritarian democracy graphically. Two variants are presented, one featuring Lijphart’s (1999) classic ‘executives–parties’ and ‘federal–unitary’ dimensions, and another incorporating direct democracy into the framework, yielding an additional ‘cabinets–direct democracy’ dimension.