Abstract
The current literature on types or models of democracy makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that the consensus model of democracy has beaten its rival, the majoritarian model of democracy, at all battlefronts. That is a remarkable change of events in the scholarly literature in not more than a few decades. The debate on the virtues of different models of democracy started in the context of the relationship between the degree of homogeneity and democracy. The awareness of such a relationship is as old as political science. Aristotle already argued that a more or less homogenous society is an important condition for a stable political system. Heterogeneity in terms of race, language or religion puts the stability of a political system at risk. A more refined version of this argument is that not homogeneity as such is conducive for the stability of a political system, but the extent to which they are cross-cutting rather than mutually reinforcing. As Lipset (1960: 89) argues “...the chances for stable democracy are enhanced to the extent that groups and individuals have a number of crosscutting, politically relevant affiliations. To the degree that a significant proportion of the population is pulled among conflicting forces, its members have an interest in reducing the intensity of political conflict.” The belief in the validity of this general law of political stability in the Anglo-Saxon literature of the 1960s and 1970s was such that Robert Dahl, one of its advocates, once confronted a Dutch colleague with the statement: “You know, your country theoretically cannot exist” (Daalder 1974: 606).
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Thomassen, J. (2002). The Consensus Model of Democracy: Superior But Not Perfect. In: Fuchs, D., Roller, E., Weßels, B. (eds) Bürger und Demokratie in Ost und West. VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-322-89596-7_27
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