Content area
Full Text
Defining the Consociational Coalition
Coalition politics is at the heart of consociational democracy. According to the theory, the core executive is, if not the only, at least a crucial venue for elite accommodation of political conflict in deeply divided societies. Of course, it is possible that elite accommodation takes place outside the cabinet room, in coalition committees composed of party leaders who may not even be members of the cabinet, or in the negotiations between party leaders during the period of government formation, or through some other functionally equivalent arrangement. However, even in such cases its constitutional position demands that the government will at least accept and implement the outcome of such external mechanisms for conflict resolution (Andeweg and Timmermans, 2008). Explicitly or implicitly, this has several consequences for the composition of the government, for decision-making within the government, and for executive-legislative relations.
For coalition politics to play its role in elite accommodation, it is imperative that the main social segments are represented in the government. Formation of a 'grand coalition' including political representatives from the main social segments more or less defined consociational democracy in Lijphart's early work (Lijphart, 1968a, 19-22) and later it was always the first of his four characteristics of consociational democracy (Lijphart, 1977, 25-47). And when discussing the 10 characteristics of his more recent 'consensus model' vs the majoritarian 'Westminster model', he asserts that 'executive power-sharing in broad coalition cabinets' marks 'the most important and typical difference between the two models of democracy because it epitomizes the contrast between concentration of power on one hand and power-sharing on the other' (Lijphart, 1999, 62, 90-115). Strictly speaking, we should expect governments in which all parties (or at least all parties representing the main social segments) take part, but with the exception of Switzerland this is rare even for recognized consociational democracies. Lijphart's usual operationalization of the 'grand coalition' is a coalition containing more parties than necessary for obtaining a majority of seats in parliament. In technical terms, consociational coalitions are expected to be surplus majority coalitions. Even this weaker criterion is not unproblematic as many Austrian Grosse Koalitionen have been minimal winning coalitions, containing only two parties (SPÖ and ÖVP). In the Dutch party system, however, five parties are generally...