Book Review: Democracy and Social Peace in Divided Societies: Exploring Consociational Parties
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BOOK REVIEW: DEMOCRACY AND SOCIAL PEACE IN DIVIDED SOCIETIES: EXPLORING CONSOCIATIONAL PARTIES Democracy and social peace in divided societies: Exploring consociational parties. Matthijs Bogaards. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 256 pp. £58.00 (hardback).There have certainly been many scholars and practitioners interested in consociational democracy whom academic literature, so far, could not provide an answer to the following question: Is Consociationalism only applicable at the state level or is it also relevant for individual organizations such as parties? The answer, it seems according to a recent publication by Matthijs Bogaards, is the latter. The book asks: Do consociational parties work in the same way as classic consociational democracies and do they produce the same results, if perhaps under different conditions? (p. 11).This work starts from the central claim that consociational literature has until now ignored the possibility that political representation and accommodation of diversity take place rather than among parties (p. 1, emphasis original). Therefore, the author introduces the concept of a 'consociational party' - a party that within itself combines all five features of Consociationalism (the party-political organization of socio-cultural differences, a grand coalition of group leaders, proportionality, group autonomy, and a mutual veto) (p. 2).The book is motivated by three central concerns: First, to explore the circumstances under which consociational parties develop, succeed, and fail; second, to analyse the role such parties play in the broader system; and third, to examine the legacy of consociational parties in safeguarding democracy and social peace.The book explores these concerns by means of seven case studies on consociational parties - four historical ones (the Alliance party in Fiji, the Congress party in India, the Kenya African National Union, and the socialist party of Yugoslavia) and three contemporary ones (the Liberal Party in Canada, the Alliance/National Front in Malaysia, and the African National Congress in South Africa).Throughout the book, Bogaards tests three hypotheses: Firstly, internalising the external dimension of accommodation, the consociational party's dual functions of representation and accommodation are likely to produce inherent tensions, thus inhibiting organizational performance. Secondly, since consociational parties tend to be dominant parties, they are better able to represent a plurality when operating in majoritarian systems. Thirdly, the way socio-cultural representation is organized in a consociational party affects nature, impact, and extent of accommodation.The book is organised into seven chapters: The first one introduces the concept of a consociational party and constructs a typology consisting of five different party types: The alliance party, the congress party, the rainbow party, the league model, and the single party - the first three being democratic types, the last two undemocratic ones.Chapters two to five look at these different types of consociational parties one after another by means of seven case studies: The second chapter considers the alliance party model drawing on the examples of Malaysia and Fiji; the third chapter moves on to the congress model in India and Canada while chapter four considers non-democratic types such as the league model in Yugoslavia and the single party in Kenya. The fifth chapter, finally, considers the rainbow party model in South Africa.Chapter six turns to exploring the factors that contribute to the emergence of consociational parties. Here Bogaards brings forward his central argument that the nature of the regime is a crucial contributing factor to the development of consociational parties, which appear to flourish in majoritarian systems: As dominant parties, consociational parties benefit from majoritarian institutions, making representation more inclusive and accommodation more far-reaching and effective (p. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".