Patterns of Democracy

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss and compare democratic institutions.

With Arend Lijphart I discuss some of the fundamental questions regarding democratic institutions based on his seminal book “Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries”, that he first published in 1999 and then updated in 2012. 

The book contrasts majoritarian and consensus models of democracy. It teaches a lot about democratic institutions and it greatly increased my own knowledge when I first read it during my studies. While the book has, of course, received some criticism, it remains a benchmark study of democracy.

We talk about the stability and functioning of different systems of government and proportional representation in divided societies. I also wanted to know from him whether his conclusions had changed since the first publication of the book in 1999, and we also touch upon recent political events that make consensus models of democracy appear to be the far better choice.

Arend Lijphart is really a giant in the study of democratic systems and institutions, being among the most cited political scientists. So I am honored and grateful to have the opportunity of welcoming him on the Rules of the Game podcast. 

Arend Lijphart is Professor Emeritus at the Political Science Department of UC San Diego. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1963. Arend’s research focuses on comparative politics, elections and voting systems, institutions, ethnicity and politics, and he is a leading authority on consociationalism. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books. He was elected to serve as president of the American Political Science Association in 1995-96. He has received numerous awards throughout his career, including the Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science, the Aaron Wildavsky Book Award, and three honorary doctorates. 

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the thirty-third episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. I am always curious to hear your opinion, so please send me an email to [email protected]. A great way to support my podcast is to leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. So if you want to do me a favor please rate the podcast and your favored platform. If you find my discussions interesting and you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog. 

Please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Arend Lijphart. 

Discussion:

Stephan Kyburz: Arend Lijphart, I’m very honored to welcome you on the Rules of the Game podcast. 

Arend Lijphart: Thank you. 

Stephan Kyburz: So, my first question to all guests is always what is your first memory of democracy or of politics in general?

Arend Lijphart: For me growing up in the Netherlands, the first memory of democracy was right after the Second World War, which was over, of course, in 1945. I was then eight years old. I had no memory of what happened before the war. But during the war, under German occupation, of course, there was no democracy at all. In fact, Holland lived under the supreme authority of Adolf Hitler and, of course, his representatives in the Netherlands. After the war, normal politics resumed in the Netherlands. It was the hope of many people during the Second World War, that when the war was over, the politics in the Netherlands would be a bit healthier in the sense of not being so divided again. But basically the first election after the war was very much like the last election before the war. But I’m digressing now. So things got going again. And I think my first memory was probably that my father was elected to the city council, town council. And so, of course, you know, I listened to conversations having to do with that. 

Stephan Kyburz: So, that’s interesting because also my father was a municipality councilor. So, that’s also one of my first memories. But it’s very interesting, of course yours is very far back and it’s always interesting and fascinating to hear the stories and where people really for the first time felt like democracy and politics active as a memory.

Intermezzo

Stephan Kyburz: You have written the book, patterns of democracy, government forms and performance in 36 countries, which is in political science, a very influential book and I can recommend it to anybody who wants to learn a lot about institutions in a very short time. And it’s really a benchmark book in political science and also beyond for a general audience, I think as well. So in that book, you contrast a consensus model of democracy to a majoritarian model of democracy and you use a lot of different variables, a lot of different main characteristics in systems of government to compare the two. Now I think to go through all of them would be taking too much time. But for you, what are still the main characteristics or the main elements of the consensus and the majoritarian model? Where do you put most emphasis? 

Arend Lijphart: I think that the most important characteristic of consensus democracy versus majoritarian democracy is that you have in consensus democracy, a multiparty system generally as the result of proportional representation. You have, usually coalition, cabinets and alike. Whereas in majoritarian democracies, typically you have a plurality system of elections, you have a two party system or close to a two party system as Britain has and usually a single party majority cabinet. That is one aspect of it. The other aspect of consensus democracy has to do with the division of power. Federalism and decentralization versus centralized government and some characteristics related to that. When I wrote my first book on the subject, which was called… simply called “Democracies” published in 1984, I think, I did not have these two dimensions in mind. I thought they were all contrast and characteristics of the two models. But then in practice, I found out that there are actually these two separate dimensions. One has to do with kind of governing together and the other one has to do with government in separate institutions like in Federalism where you have, you know, it’s not working together, it’s working separately, but presumably in order to achieve a consensus. Of those two, it’s the first dimension that’s the most important for most countries and the most important for having effects on how well democracy works. But the other characteristic, the other dimension rather, well not unimportant, does not have such important effects on policy.

Stephan Kyburz: For a long time some people said that majoritarian systems are, you know, more stable and also therefore more efficient and provide more direct governance and they are providing better results. But in the book, you clearly show that this is not the case. Can you maybe elaborate a bit on how consensus democracy versus majoritarian democracy, how they differ in how they affect policy outcomes? And you also mentioned in the book that consensus models of democracy provide a kinder and gentler type of democracy and also government policy. 

Arend Lijphart: So for a long time I was convinced by what was the conventional wisdom when I was a graduate student. And also, you know, once I was, once I had my PhD. I believed that there were contrasting differences in outcome, that one would choose consensus democracy, I didn’t use that, wasn’t using that term yet, but government with multi party systems, proportional representation and so on, that that would be better for the quality of democracy, had better minority representation for instance. But that came at the cost of less efficiency. With british government as the most important example of majoritarian democracy being the more effective and efficient. That was already challenged not by me originally, but by the british political scientist S. E. Finer, who was very, very well known, one of the top british political scientists and who mainly was thinking in terms of contrasting british government with german government and said, you know, the german government is really just more effective than the british government. And he attributed the failure of the British system to the fact that there were too many changes back and forth. You have one government which could make decisions quickly and then you would have the opposition in charge, it would undo a lot of the stuff that the previous government had done and would turn things around. So you did not have stability, but in fact you had a great instability in effective policy making, including especially of course economic policy making. And he said what you have in Germany instead, you have coalition government which tends to be more in the center and so even if there is a change in government, the outlook of the government doesn’t change all that much. When I started thinking about it that way I went back to what Finer had to say and basically I would have to agree with him. But I guess into the 1980s, I was still thinking in terms of this, you know, advantages and disadvantages over the consensus system. The 1984 book, which was the first attempt at looking at the two systems of government, I didn’t go into the question of policy effects or effects on quality of democracy. I did that in the 1999 book and I think I, if I may say so myself, I perfected that in my 2012, 2nd edition. I was then helped by all of the data available on the internet and all of the groups that were making comprehensive indices of effective government, of responsible government in terms of the environment and so on. And so these were all things that I could use, and very nicely, I had not prepared those. So, I was basically, I am completely neutral, I say, but they are having these providing these indices they’re great for me to use. And so the quality of the data became so much better between 1999 and 2012, really. And something that still amazes me. And when I was working on the 1999 book, I turned to the Internet sometimes too and found that there just wasn’t much that I could use. And so I said forget about that. I’ll walk to the library and I’ll find the data that I need. It had become completely different when I was working on the 2012 edition. Of course I was working on it in 2009/2010, so in a little bit more than 10 years, things have completely turned around. So I am also much more confident in the results that I found In my 2012 book. And again, somewhat you can see how long these prejudices last. Somewhat to my surprise, I found out that consensus democracies are not only better at providing better quality of democracy, better minority representation, better representation of women. And you can kind of go down a whole list of those kinds of things but also with regard to the quality of government, the quality of policy, looking at economic things like economic growth, inflation, unemployment and some general indicators that economic researchers have made for effective government. And really with very few exceptions, I found consensus democracy doing better. And not just slightly better. I have 36 countries, so a large enough number to do statistical tests on and most of these results on which the consensus democracy is doing better, when they are so strong they are statistically significant. So it was a surprise to me that it was that strong. I had not expected that. But of course I was very pleased to see it because it makes my conclusions much sounder. 

Stephan Kyburz: So your conclusions were almost reinforced. Did you yourself get more convinced of that view of the consensus versus the majoritarian model of democracy? 

Arend Lijphart: Yes. Yes. You can’t argue with the data. The data shows very clearly that that is the case. And again I’m just mentioning a few things here. But how many indicators do I have? Like at least 20 or so different indicators. And it all comes out better that way. With regard to these kinder and gentler things it also comes out better. When you looked at, you know, which countries have the death penalty which versus which countries don’t, which countries do a better job on the environment. And so it really is… Perhaps when one reads my book superficially one would think, I know I’m prejudiced in that way. But I can say that I’m not prejudiced. In fact I did not expect such outstanding results. So I was convinced by the outcome of the data analysis. And I would say to anyone: if you want to redo my analysis, all of the data are available on the website of the political science department at U. C. San Diego. You can find all the data there. You can do a re-analysis of all of that. And by the time that, as I said I’m 86 years old now, when this was, my book in 2012, I was 76. By that time I was not going to write a 3rd edition. In fact, already after the 1999 edition I had decided this is so much work that I do not want to do it. But Yale University Press pushed me to do it because that first edition had been quite successful and they wanted me to do a 2nd edition. I kept saying no for a long time but then finally I changed my mind. And also I thought the message of the book is important enough to keep it, keep it alive. And so I did write it and as I told you I mean that the results of that 2nd edition are just so much stronger and clearer that I’m very pleased that I did that. But I do have to say it was an awful lot of work. It’s not like a historian writing about, you know, the history of Europe since the year 2000 and then wants to, and he or she then wants to update it to 2010, but you just write another chapter, right? Change a few things. But in my case of course I had to… the 36 countries in the two books are not exactly the same countries. So that was already one change. And basically I had to go over all of the individual data for each country. So it was, it really meant redoing the whole book instead of just adding a chapter or a forward to it. But again, as I said, I’m glad I did it. And I’m actually hoping, I’m mentioning this to several people. If you want to update all of this to the year 2020 or 2022, please do! And I’ll be very interested in what, what the outcome is. In all probability the number of countries could be increased. I said this, my countries had to be democratic for a period of, I think it was 25 years, I’ve forgotten now, but in any case not just very recent democracy. So there would be something that could be added now, like the eastern european countries. Even though, you know, with regard to Hungary and Poland one is again doubtful that those are really democracies. But the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia probably now, there are countries that should be added. Perhaps some that should be changed. One other thing that makes me feel that my results are really very strong is that with the democracies that I studied, those 36, that is not just a sample that I took of democracies. No, it’s the universe. It’s all of the democracies existing at that time that had been democratic for a minimum period of time. In a way that’s a strange conclusion because many countries claimed to be a democracy, but 36 was the sum total of democracies to meet my criteria. 

Intermezzo

Stephan Kyburz: I definitely think it’s a remarkable book. There has been rarely a book that I’ve read that I’ve learned so much from. You know, my background is more from economics, political economy. So this was really for me, a book that changed my understanding of the mechanics of democracies and how they work and different types. And I read it also, you know, early in my studies, but I thought it was fascinating. So is that also the reason you included mostly OECD Countries and then also some emerging democracies? Do you think that was the reason why you didn’t include that many, you know, in Latin America and in African countries?

Arend Lijphart: I just went strictly according to the limit of what was considered democracies and the countries that had been democracies for a minimum period of time. And so I was actually more inclusive than some people who do comparative studies because I had a population cut off that is pretty low. I think it’s like 250,000 people. And so that makes me include countries like the Bahamas, Iceland and so on. With regard to the results I always controlled for the size of country because that can make a difference and also for degree of development. So those two very important variables are controlled for. But I have a huge variation in size, population size of these countries. I mean I have India, of course, is part of this. That’s also I guess still a developing country. Some other large countries too, the United States, Japan but still the population of India is larger than all of the other 35 countries combined. So if you ask me what is the main difference between these 36 countries, it’s size of population. Obviously the differences in the degree of development, you can think of a number of other factors but I have really a huge variety of size of population. 

Stephan Kyburz: One argument that is sometimes made is that in multi ethnic, multi religious plural societies, that proportional representation system would maybe lead to more cleavages because the parties would just form themselves according to different groups, being religious groups or ethnic groups. And many countries, especially in African countries, they often have not proportional systems, but majoritarian electoral systems, right? What is your view of this? I mean from the book, we would conclude that proportional systems are better in any case, right? But maybe you can elaborate a bit on how you see this problematic. And also maybe related to other countries, right, that maybe we’re more homogeneous in more older times and became more plural societies as a whole. 

Arend Lijphart: Many countries where that has happened because of immigration and population movements. That was a question that I dealt with in my earlier work with my book “Democracy in Plural Societies”, which was published in 1977. And there I challenged the view that in plural or deeply divided societies say something like proportional representation would be more dangerous. My finding there, and of course that I did not have, you know, that kind of exact statistical model that I used in the later book, was that what these countries need is for all of the groups being able to participate in the government instead of some groups included other groups excluded, which is especially serious when these groups are ethnically or religiously based. And in fact, all of this started out with a study that I did of my native country, the Netherlands, which was a deeply divided country with a very rigid separate subcultures, catholic subculture, protestant calvinist subculture and a kind of a relatively unreligious or moderate subculture. And those subcultures like in many years in Africa, we were not not talking with each other. I have a statistic, one bit of statistics in there showing that, you know what intermarriage rates were like between the different groups and it was almost non existent. And when I grew up would a catholic marry a protestant? No way. I mean it happened, but it was just a glaring exception. All of this has changed nowadays, in effect in my family. I feel, well I’m married to a catholic, my brother is married to a catholic and I come from a you know, moderate protestant background. So that has changed. But so what is important is for the leaders of these different groups to come together at the top and make forth to compromise. And in fact what is the most dangerous is for one group to achieve exclusive power and other groups being excluded. And I think actually that message that was relatively new when I wrote “Democracy in Plural Societies” in 1977, I think it has become the general approach, say of the United Nations. So what kind of system that the United Nations suggest for Iraq after the Iraq war? It is basically that kind of system with proportional representation saying certain officers should be given to certain groups like the president, I think of Iraq has to be a Curd and you know, things like that. That does not guarantee that it will work better, but I think it is much better than simply saying we’ll just elect the president and you know, especially if the president has great power, that means the president is the representative of one particular group and the other groups are excluded. So in many countries, in Africa, you have very significant ethnic differences. What would I suggest for those countries? If you think proportional representation is dangerous and I don’t think it is when you, you will certainly get more clearly ethnic or religious parties, but as long as the leaders are willing to work together, that is not, in my view, not a problem. And what is the alternative? Certainly a presidential system is about the worst that can be taught. But unfortunately, most of those countries seem to want presidential systems. And you just saw it recently in Nairobi and Kenya, where you have these two contenders that are actually very close in terms of the election results, they should be working together instead of one being the winner and the other one being excluded. Now, this time, it seems to have been relatively peaceful. It ended up with the basic, with a lot of ethnic strife the last time around and a lot of people being killed in that strife. So you could have the british system in a parliamentary system, but with, you know, a majoritarian type, you know, you have the same kind of problem. That you’re likely to have one group in power and the other group excluded. And what you need again is to have a system in which the leaders cooperate. So what is generally the best system in my view it’s a parliamentary system and proportional representation. That does not guarantee that they work well. But at least it has better possibilities than either the British type or say an American style presidential system. It’s really too bad that both the United States and Britain have been such models for other countries for a long time. And of course the British exported their model to their colonies and the United States model, both of such great importance in South America. Both, you know, I think, were very unfortunate historical happenings. 

Stephan Kyburz: And also I did a lot of research actually on Nigeria, like more political economy research. But also in Nigeria that has a very majoritarian model of democracy. Of course, it’s a federal system so that might compensate some of the issues, but still it’s a presidential system. It’s a first past the post system at all levels of government. And also I think that was strongly influenced by the American model. 

Arend Lijphart: Yeah, the american and the british model, of course, you know, it was a british colony. So the kind of a combination of the… It combines the worst of the american and british models.

Stephan Kyburz: And also interesting is actually that Switzerland is also a very plural society with different religions. The Catholics, the Protestants, which were severe opponents. You had different languages and only a proportional representation electoral system, in 1919, was it introduced. And also this special type of government, the Federal council, right? Instead of having one president, there are seven people who share power and have to make decisions together, which is a very unique, it’s very rare system. But those elements were really important for the swiss plural society to become that type of consensus model of democracy. 

Arend Lijphart: Absolutely. So actually, in my book, I use Switzerland and Britain as a kind of almost pure examples of consensus versus majoritarian government. I doubt that the Swiss model is a good one for export to other countries. Even though in Switzerland, the Federal Council is really closer to a parliamentary system than a presidential system. Partly because it is a coalition government and it avoids the one person control. In the parliamentary system if you have a cabinet there, the prime minister still tends to be primus inter pares, to use the latin term. Always the more important. Even though in most parliamentary systems, we look at Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium and so on, the Prime Minister is not as powerful a figure as it is in British government. There’s much more of a sense of collegial government. But I would say this one problem, the cynicism, it’s kind of hard to think of how you would install something like that in a different country. So I would still better just go for a straightforward parliamentary system and proportional representation. And then if it looks like federalism is a good addition to that, I’m all in favor of that. And I think that can also help getting some, you know, minority representation if you have geographically concentrated minorities. 

Intermezzo

Stephan Kyburz: So, one argument about parliamentary system that is… that we hear very often is that it doesn’t provide for stable governments. What is your counter argument against this problematic of unstable governments in parliamentary systems? 

Arend Lijphart: I guess I have two arguments. One is that, how do you measure stability? And it was often said that the French 4th Republic, being especially unstable. The government. But if you look closely from one government to the next, the personnel in the cabinet did not change much. So it wasn’t in fact all that unstable. And the second, my second argument would be, what is that stability for? Is that in order to achieve good policy results? If it doesn’t do that, then what’s the purpose of stability? And according to my results, it does not provide better quality government. 

Stephan Kyburz: I totally agree with that. So, based on your book for the United States, what would be your recommendation? I guess proportional representation is, you know, there is a huge discussion going on right now or huge… There is a discussion. I don’t know exactly how big it is. So I guess you’re in favor of that too? 

Arend Lijphart: Yes, I’m in favor of proportional representation for the United States. There is a lot of discussion of that. There is a very active Think Tank in Washington called Fair Vote that they’ve had some good results at the state and local level in getting proportional representation. Or often called the Single Transferable Vote or the Alternative Vote to have that produced instead of just simple. Plus, I’m in favor of all of those things. But ideally it would be proportional representation. That would be number one. The other one would be to… And that would actually be relatively, it’s not going to happen very soon. But that would be relatively easy to introduce because it does not require a change in the American constitution, it can simply be legislated by Congress. So if Congress were to decide now that all elections should be by proportional representation, they could do so if they would be willing to do it. The other thing that I would like to get rid of it, the presidential system and introduce the parliamentary system. That of course is anchored in the constitution, but that would be… Just would want to make the United States into another in Germany for instance. And Germany is not a bad example because other than, say, Sweden, the Netherlands, Switzerland and so on, Germany is a big country. Now, I think probably 90 million people or so. The United States is still bigger, but it’s kind of the same order of magnitude. So, you know, the argument is not there of the oh well, but those are very small countries, you know, you have Germany as an example. I mean, smaller changes, I think the United States, the democracy works very badly, and right now it is under extreme threat from Trump. So I don’t know where that is going to lead. One of the problems there is the American system of partisan primaries which give the extremes of the parties too much influence and right now the extreme, I mean, I think it’s ridiculous. Republicans talk about the turn to the far left of the Democratic Party, which I think is just so ridiculous if you think that the Democratic Party is still way to the right compared with European Social Democratic parties. But in any case I do not think that there’s the extremes in the Democratic Party are as serious as the extremes in the Republican Party. But in any case, that is what primaries do. And it’s really an interesting result because those primaries were put in by the Progressive Movement or were advocated by the Progressive Movement in order to give, quote, the people, unquote more influence. But the way it has worked in practice is that it gives the extremes more influence and the extremes that really are just not representative of the larger population. You don’t see much discussion on that. Actually, I’m in the middle of reading a New York Times article in the New York Times of today, which raises this question of what the result of partisan primaries are. So one reform, I would say, just abolish the primaries altogether and get back to the, quote, smoke filled rooms, unquote, where the leaders of the parties make the decision and I think the british government of course, and the British Conservative Party made just a huge mistake in having their primary with the dues paying members of the Conservative Party, making the final decision on the leader of the party and the Prime Minister. I mean, that is just… I have only one word for it. It’s an idiotic idea. An idiotic idea. I mean, to think that that gives the people some influence, you know, this handful of Conservative Party members to give them the final word on who is the most important leader in the country. I don’t really, I don’t understand how they got to such a ridiculous method of selecting a leader. The way it used to be, you have elected Conservative members of parliament. These elected members should choose their new leader and that’s the way it used to be. And I think that given, that the British system, there is, there are lots of disadvantages, but that seems like the logical way of selecting who should be the leader of the party. 

Stephan Kyburz: But in the end, the members of parliament, they had a say, right? So the candidates needed their support. 

Arend Lijphart: That is, that is true. No leader can stay in power without the support of parliament. But you saw in the case of Liz Truss who now just recently resigned and now she’s being replaced by somebody else, that the ideas that she had were more the ideas of these very conservative formal members of the party. But once she was elected, you know, then the members of parliament just accepted that as that was the choice. But indeed, I don’t know, you probably know the name of Juan Linz who was the first person to really go straight into this fight against presidential government. And then he says, you know, parliamentary government like in Britain, is that better? Obviously, his surreal preference was also for parliamentary government and proportional representation, but he, he shows that even in a government of Britain with the majoritarianism and a strong prime minister, if the prime minister loses the support of parliament, he or she is out. That’s what happened with Margaret Thatcher,  the so-called Iron Lady. Conservative members of Parliament didn’t like her anymore. She was a goner. 

Stephan Kyburz: And also Juan Linz is obviously an important contributor to the discussion. And I had several discussions on presidentialism versus parliamentarism. And also on semi-parliamentarism, actually. There is also some new books there which I think are really interesting. Yeah, I feel we could go in so many different directions, there is so much to talk about. Unfortunately times are quite hectic in many countries. I wish it would be more calm and I think a more consensus oriented model of democracy would definitely lead to more calm politics instead of these really extreme swings between left and right. 

Intermezzo

Stephan Kyburz: Do you have any other books that you would recommend to the audience? I definitely will link to your research and your book, of course. 

Arend Lijphart: Yeah, anybody who has, I can think of Juan Linz wrote together with Arturo Valenzuela on the questions of parliamentarism and Presidentialism. On the question of deeply divided societies and what the best government is to people, whose work I would recommend is Brendan O’Leary who is originally from Ireland and he’s done a lot of work on Northern Ireland. And I’ve, of course, I’ve been involved in thinking about making proposals for Northern Ireland which have led to the Good Friday agreement. But he’s written a lot more about those, about Northern Ireland and about lots of other countries, several of which, you know, I have not covered in my work. The other one is John McGary, John, it’s Mac Gary, G A R R Y. He’s at Queen’s University in Canada. He’s worked a lot together with Brendan O’Leary. Brendan O’Leary is at the University of Pennsylvania. I know both of them quite well and if anybody wants to go beyond that ask them for further names. I mean they’re very active in that whole network. On my work on what I’ve called Consociational Democracy or Power Sharing Democracy, having specifically to do with deeply divided societies. On this question of consensus democracy there are two names of people who have done further work on that. One is Adrian Vatter, who is at the University of Bern, you probably know him from there. He has worked together with Julian Bernauer who is at the University of Constance.

Stephan Kyburz: Exactly. I know them and I’m happy to include those recommendations of course. 

Arend Lijphart: And so because I have… After, especially after finishing the 2012 “Patterns of Democracy”, I have really not been following all the literature anymore. So I said by the time when I had finished that, I was 75/76 years old, about  time to really retire. And so I’ve been trying to be really retired since then. It doesn’t always work completely, like now talking with you about professional things. But basically, you know, I have not been going to conferences and basically left all of that behind me. 

Stephan Kyburz: There’s lots of things going on, of course. It’s impossible to follow everything and the literature, but I’m very, very grateful you have taken the time, even during your retirement. I really appreciate it and thanks a lot for all your contributions. And of course, for the conversation, it has been a great pleasure. 

Arend Lijphart: Good. You’re very welcome. It was interesting to meet you. To talk with you.