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Democratic elections in South Africa have been held using a closed-list PR system since 1994. Despite significant debate on whether the system should be reformed, the 1994 system has been retained. The South African electoral system is the most proportional system used in any democratic state, given that seat allocations are ultimately determined in one national constituency with 400 members. There is widespread agreement that it has performed well on most criteria, the exception being a perceived lack of ‘accountability’ between MPs and voters. Some critics feel that the closed-list system without districts gives too much power to party leaders, and does not give MPs incentives to represent distinct geographical areas.

Compares Northern Ireland with a number of other divided societies in Europe, including South Tyrol, Cyprus, and the Hungarian regions of Romania, Slovakia, and Serbia. It argues that states are unlikely to accommodate minorities if their ethnic kin in neighbouring states pursue irredentist claims. An agreement became acceptable to Northern Ireland's unionists only when the Irish republic removed its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland. Alcock also argues that unionists were able to accept the all‐Ireland institutions in Northern Ireland's Agreement in the context of similar developments in other parts of the European Union. The chapter is an example of ‘linkage’ politics, i.e. it stresses links between exogenous factors and internal politics.

Chapter 2 analyses the legacy of constitutionalism for politics and law beyond the state. It retraces the different modes in which constitutionalism has been conceptualized in regional and global contexts, asks what it means to ‘translate’ such a concept into another sphere, and investigates the historical and normative pedigree of its main strands—power-limiting and foundational constitutionalism. Foundational constitutionalism has been the dominant tradition in Western politics over the last two centuries, but if we take the experience of divided societies as a measure, it is unlikely fully to redeem its promise of framing (and taming) politics through law in the highly diverse and contested postnational space. Yet lowering ambitions and retreating to a power-limiting form of constitutionalism—a frequent move in current debates—would sell the constitutionalist project short: it would fail to live up to the more radical promise connected with it historically.

This chapter demonstrates the organizers' efforts to persuade their socially diverse youth volunteers to bond quickly, easily, and comfortably. Such efforts are based on the hope that the act of sharing their personal tastes, habits, and desires would help build stronger bonds, but the only desires that these youths have claimed to share were for pizza and blue jeans. Paradoxically, these exercises show the participants just how uncomfortable people of diverse, unequal backgrounds feel when they are thrown together. This chapter thus reveals an important sociological lesson in just how deep social divisions go. Though it is an important lesson in and of itself, it is not what the programs had aimed to teach.

Referendums are criticized not just for obvious process defects but also on the basis that the subject matter is open to manipulation, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to put a fair question to the people. This chapter addresses this issue, asking what factors contribute to the fairness, and hence the legitimacy, of a referendum question. One issue is the clarity and intelligibility of the questions and the impediments to achieving a clear question. But another equally important concern is that the referendum represents a meaningful choice between options which a plurality of people consider important and worth both deliberating over and voting on. A particular concern is divided societies; the chapter asks whether a referendum is ever appropriate in such an environment and if so what issue-framing and other process factors would be needed for such an act to meet the demands of deliberative theory.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of deliberative democracy. It then sets out the purpose of the book, which is to show that deliberative democracy has crucial, but largely untapped, implications for divided societies. To this end, it offers normative arguments, but also seeks to engage with the work of some of the most important comparative scholars working in the field of conflict studies. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

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.

This chapter examines two main forms that national identity might conceivably take. The first of these forms stresses civic institutions, public offices, agencies and officials, as well as common and authoritative rules that typically apply across the territory of a given state. By contrast, the second of these forms stresses the importance of ethnicity and culture, ancestral memories and struggles, and common fears and hopes for the future. The chapter considers how an overarching civic nationality might best be facilitated in a divided society. To this end, the chapter starts by analyzing two normative models of the democratic state: liberalism and republicanism. It then argues that in contrast to liberalism and republicanism, deliberative democracy does not deny the political significance of ethnicity or its relation to the state. Unlike liberalism, deliberative democracy does not rely upon a claim of state neutrality; nor is it precluded from responding institutionally to the claims that ethnic groups make. Unlike republicanism, it does not require the citizens to relegate their ethnicity from the public to the private sphere. Instead, deliberative democracy privileges a proceduralist view according to which a civic national identity is formed and reformed in the light of changing political circumstance.

According to John Stuart Mill, a democracy cannot succeed unless its citizens share a common national identity. This chapter begins by highlighting two main reasons why this is so — in the absence of a common national identity, citizens, firstly, will not see themselves as bound by a single political authority or, secondly, be motivated to do their part in carrying the burdens of self-government. It argues, however, that although Mill's basic claim has troubling implications for divided societies aiming to make the transition from conflict to democracy, a more complete assessment of this issue needs to distinguish between two main forms that national identity can take — civic and ethnic. The chapter then turns to the case for democracy in general and deliberative democracy in particular. Following Dahl, it maintains that any compelling defence of democracy will fall back on the values of intrinsic equality and personal autonomy. Although those values are not easy to apply in divided societies, they can be formulated in a way that ensures political equality not just between conflicting ethnic groups, but also between citizens generally. Against this background, the chapter offers an extended definition of deliberative democracy that elaborates those values in terms of two key normative requirements, namely reciprocity and publicity.

This chapter explores the requirement of reciprocity in greater detail, especially with respect to its implications for democracy in divided societies. More specifically, its purpose is to explore this requirement with respect to the task of creating the kinds of shareable goods that could potentially lead citizens to experience a stronger sense of common national identity. It starts by comparing and contrasting the requirement of reciprocity with three alternative methods by which political disagreements might potentially be resolved: force, bargaining and voting. Although each of those alternative forms certainly has its place within a democratic process, reciprocity is nevertheless essential to dealing with the problems that divided societies typically face. The chapter then considers how, by constraining the kinds of reasons that might be advanced for or against a proposed law or public policy, reciprocity can help express our equal membership in the polity. In so doing, it can aid in creating the kinds of shareable goods that could provide the basis for a stronger sense of common national identity. Finally, it explores the content of the reasons that might meet this requirement. The approach taken is basically Rawlsian in that it stresses the importance of appealing to general political principles and values when justifying proposals.

This chapter explores how publicity might be thought to contribute towards the creation a stronger sense of common national identity among members of a divided society. It approaches this basic issue by means of two subsidiary questions: How might the requirement of publicity be justified? And to what extent, or under what conditions, should publicity be guaranteed? To these ends, the chapter proceeds as follows. After defining the requirement of publicity and indicating its importance to democratic politics in divided societies, the chapter considers a number of alternative philosophical justifications for that requirement. It then considers whether publicity might help equalise the patterns of asymmetry that characterise, and often undermine, negotiation processes in divided societies. Against this background, the chapter mounts a case in support of the requirement of publicity that stresses its transformative potential. Despite this potential, however, the fact remains that secrecy, too, may be important to negotiation processes. The chapter concludes by arguing that although secrecy can indeed have an important place, the balance between publicity and secrecy must itself be publicly justified.

Deliberative democracy appears to give rise to the following dilemma. The more familiar participants are with one another, the more likely it is that their deliberations will be successful. Knowing this, there is a strong temptation for the stronger members of society to exclude the weaker. This chapter considers how deliberative democrats should respond to this dilemma. It begins by providing a specifically democratic grounding for the view that it is wrong to exclude a person from political life simply because they belong, or are viewed as belonging, to some particular ethnic group. It then examines in some detail the charge, levelled by critics such as Lyn Sanders and Iris Young, that deliberative democracy is inherently biased against disadvantaged groups and hence is inevitably exclusionary. Having laid out the various aspects of that charge, the chapter considers what a more open and inclusive conception of democratic deliberation might look like. It looks at the important role that narrative might have to play in terms of explaining and redressing the sources of ethnic conflict. It concludes, however, that although narrative has a crucial role to play in divided societies, the appeal to general political principles and standards cannot ultimately be avoided.

A central defining feature of deeply divided societies is binary division: two contrasting segments of a population that represent a cleavage significant enough to impact a wide range of issues. Deeply divided societies, delineated by difference from the “other,” can be seen as intractable identity conflicts. To reduce our understanding of social identities in Northern Ireland to religion—Protestant or Catholic—is dangerously misleading. In reality, the issue is one of national identity, where Protestant becomes shorthand for unionist (those supporting Northern Ireland’s constitutional status within the United Kingdom and opposing the involvement of the Irish Republic in Northern Ireland) and Catholic for nationalist (those believing that Northern Ireland is part of the Irish nation and opposing the imposition of British rule that prevents a united Ireland). To the Protestant-unionist and Catholic-nationalist identities are often added a third identity category—loyalist or republican.

This chapter seeks to address the question of how is sport governed in societies that are deeply divided along ethnic, religious or other lines? The chapter focuses on three case studies: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus and Northern Ireland. It argues that in each of these cases, the institutions that have been employed in order to manage relations between groups in the governance of sport are more integrative than those that have been employed at the broader political level, where accommodation or outright division are the norm. The chapter explores the nature of these institutions and examines the role of a range of actors involved in their establishment. In particular, the chapter highlights the rhetorical impact that claims about the unifying experience of sport have on relevant actors' perceptions of how it should be governed, but also questions whether the integrative approach taken in the three case studies is part of a deliberate conflict management strategy or whether it is instead simply a product of the more technocratic concerns of international and regional governing bodies.

This chapter attempts to theorise a model of critical citizenship that would bring co-nations closer towards moral recognition and/or ethical standing in divided societies. It investigates why liberals and communitarians are at loggerheads on moral values, and examines the way in which liberals and communitarians perceive the process of self-identification in terms of both personal identity and loyal membership to constitutive communities. The chapter explains how a model of critical citizenship based on the Kantian notion of critical practical reasoning can contribute to the resolution of the inert debate on the moral values of constitutive communities.

This chapter tackles one of the other key areas usually believed to show working-class rejection of state interference in their lives—the development of their own friendly societies and opposition to any government regulation of these. However, a greater problem experienced by the poorer members of friendly societies was a lack of trust in the better-off working-class leaders of their societies, and a feeling that they were often unfairly dealt with by these organizations. Their opposition to government regulation was largely based upon such interference perversely giving more power to society leaders over members. Ordinary members adopted a range of measures to counter these problems, including moving to ‘dividing’ societies which they felt were safer for their money, and also beginning to support the direct state provision of insurance.

Linda Clarke and Geraldine Magennis describe the process of review that has been underway for many years in Northern Ireland. Although the system is a relatively small one, with just four providers of teacher education, all based in Higher Education Institutions, the politics of this divided society have led to considerable inertia. The most recent review of initial teacher education led to the recommendation that there should be a rationalisation of provision and attempts to implement this are under way. It is suggested that part of the difficulty in bringing about change lies in the fact that two government departments are involved. Nevertheless in spite of these difficulties there are aspects of the Northern Irish provision that are quite distinctive including the definition of teacher professionalism and the concept of the ‘three I's’ continuum-initial, induction and in-service-the phases of teacher professional development.