politics—in part because of right-wing dominance of the Conservatives since
John Major’s resignation as leader. The election in 2001 as Conservative leader
of a little known right-wing anti-Europeanist, Iain Duncan Smith, rather than
the highly experienced and nationally popular moderate candidate, Kenneth
Clarke, did not suggest that the party would be recapturing the centre ground
of British politics in the near future.
Consociational Democracy
The example of consociational democracy best known to political scientists is
the Netherlands, although there are several other examples of the system in
world politics. The essence of consociational democracy is recognition that, in
deeply-divided societies, straightforward majoritarian democracy cannot
work. This is because deeply entrenched minorities living in a state of actual
or potential hostility with an equally cohesive majority cannot trust the results
of majoritarian decision making. In the Netherlands, until perhaps the late
1970s, the very deep religiouscleavagebetween Protestant and Roman
Catholic communities remaining from the historical formation of the Dutch
state, combined with a secular sector which objected to any clerical influence
in politics, made normal democracy difficult. As a result of this, a system which
the Dutch themselves called ‘pillarization’ developed. Accordingly, whole
sectors of society, especially education and the media, were triplicate: the state
guaranteed the fair provision of schools, and even universities, separately for
each faith community and for the secular world. Similarly, a complex set of
coalitionarrangements ensured that all three pillars were always represented in
government, and further steps ensured parity of representation of the two
religious communities in public services.
The religious cleavages in the Netherlands have become unimportant
because ofsecularization, but, nevertheless, vestiges of the system remain.
Other examples, even if not so labelled, can be recognized. The idea of power-
sharing in Northern Ireland, for example, is essentially a matter of consocia-
tional democracy: there could be no hope for peace in Northern Ireland under
single-religion governments supported and elected by a numerical majority of
the population. Religion—because it tends to be the most intense of human
conflicts—is the most frequent cause of consociationalism, as, for example, for
many years in Indonesia under President Suharto.
In practice, consociationalism can be the solution wherever there are
entrenched and hostile communities. Perhaps the best way of thinking of it
is as a form of non-geographic federalism. The problem is that the very act of
separately representing and providing for these different ethnic, religious or
other minority cultures risks entrenching them in the social conscience, thus
delaying or preventing the growth of a tolerant multicultural society. Tolerance
Consociational Democracy