Open Access
Constitutional Design for Divided Societies
Arend Lijphart
- Vol. 1, Iss: 4, pp 33-44
TLDR
Lijphart as mentioned in this paper presents a set of such recommendations, focusing in particular on the constitutional needs of countries with deep ethnic and other cleavages, and his recommendations will indicate as precisely as possible which particular power-sharing rules and institutions are optimal and why.Abstract:
Over the past half-century, democratic constitutional design has undergone a sea change. After the Second World War, newly independent countries tended simply to copy the basic constitutional rules of their former colonial masters, without seriously considering alternatives. Today, constitution writers choose more deliberately among a wide array of constitutional models, with various advantages and disadvantages. While at first glance this appears to be a beneficial development, it has actually been a mixed blessing: Since they now have to deal with more alternatives than they can readily handle, constitution writers risk making ill-advised decisions. In my opinion, scholarly experts can be more helpful to constitution writers by formulating specific recommendations and guidelines than by overwhelming those who must make the decision with a barrage of possibilities and options. This essay presents a set of such recommendations, focusing in particular on the constitutional needs of countries with deep ethnic and other cleavages. In such deeply divided societies the interests and demands of communal groups can be accommodated only by the establishment of power sharing, and my recommendations will indicate as precisely as possible which particular power-sharing rules and institutions are optimal and why. (Such rules and institutions may be useful in less intense forms in many other societies as well.) Most experts on divided societies and constitutional engineering broadly agree that deep societal divisions pose a grave problem for democracy, and that it is therefore generally more difficult to establish and maintain democratic government in divided than in homogeneous Arend Lijphart is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (1999) and many other studies of democratic institutions, the governance of deeply divided societies, and electoral systems.read more
Citations
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Economic versus Cultural Differences: Forms of Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision
Kate Baldwin,John D. Huber +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, between-group inequality (BGI) has a large, robust, and negative relationship with public goods provision, whereas ELF, cultural fractionalization (CF), and overall inequality do not.
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Driving Democracy: Do Power-Sharing Institutions Work?
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compare four types of political institutions: the electoral system, parliamentary or presidential executives, unitary or federal states, and the structure and independence of the mass media.
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The Electoral Sweet Spot: Low-Magnitude Proportional Electoral Systems
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TL;DR: The authors showed that low-magnitude multi-member districts produce disproportionality indices almost on par with those of pure proportional representation (PR) while limiting party system fragmentation and producing simpler government coalitions.
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Variations on a Theme
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An international comparison of four polycentric approaches to climate and energy governance
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References
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Constitutional Design: Proposals Versus Processes
TL;DR: Constitution-making has become an international and comparative exercise in a way that it rarely was in the century before 1989 as discussed by the authors, where the involvement of experts and practitioners across state boundaries has been welcomed, indeed encouraged, to the point at which a new democracy that excluded foreigners entirely from its constitutional process might stamp itself as decidedly insular, even somewhat suspect.
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The Indispensability of Political Parties
TL;DR: In this paper, the centrality of institutionalized party competition is emphasized, and a minimalist conception of democracy is presented, where the largest possible part of the population can influence major decisions by choosing among contenders for political office through political parties.
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Electoral Systems: A Primer for Decision Makers
TL;DR: In this article, the authors set out several possible purposes of electoral systems that can be found in the literature on the subject and then made some observations about those purposes and the electoral system that further them, concluding that the best electoral system is the one that straightforwardly and most accurately reflects the preferences of voters.