The Favourable Factors For Consociational Democracy: A Review

Abstract

The favourable factors for the establishment and maintenance of consociational democracy are among the most contested elements of consociationalism. The debate concerns both the favourable factors themselves and their status. The debate over the former is provoked by the inductive character; the debate over the latter can be traced back to an unresolved conflict between deterministic and voluntaristic elements in consociational theory. What is at stake is a trade-off between the empirical explanatory and predictive power of the consociational model on the one hand and its normative usefulness on the other. Shifting the focus from contextual variables to a theory of elite behavior may present a way out of the current stalemate. This would be in line with the recent interest in crafting democracies.