Arend Lijphart

Arend d'Angremond Lijphart (born 17 August 1936) is a Dutch-American political scientist specializing in comparative politics, elections and voting systems, democratic institutions, and ethnicity and politics.

He is Research Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

He is influential for his work on consociational democracy and his contribution to the new Institutionalism in political science.

Lijphart was born in Apeldoorn, Netherlands in 1936.

During his youth, he experienced World War II and he attributed his aversion "to violence" and interest "in questions of both peace and democracy" to this experience.

He has a B.A. from Principia College in 1958 and a PhD in political science from Yale University in 1963.

Lijphart taught at Elmira College (1961–63), the University of California, Berkeley (1963–68), at Leiden University (1968–78), and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) (1978–2000).

Lijphart developed this concept in his first major work, The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands (1968), a study of the Dutch political system, and further developed his arguments in Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (1977).

In The Politics of Accommodation (1968), Lijphart challenges the influential pluralist theory and argues that the main factor in having a viable democracy in a strongly divided society is the spirit of accommodation among the elites of different groups.

Lijphart has also made influential contributions to methodological debates within comparative politics, most notably through his 1971 article "Comparative Politics and the Comparative Method," published in the American Political Science Review.

In this article Lijphart argues that the comparative method can be understood in contrast to the experimental and statistical methods and claims that the main difficulty facing the comparative method is that "it must generalize on the basis of relatively few empirical cases."

To solve this problem, Lijphart suggests four solutions:

Lijphart also discusses the case study method and identifies six types of case studies:

Lijphart work on methodology drew on ideas developed by Neil Smelser.

It was also the point of departure for the work by David Collier on the comparative method.

In Democracy in Plural Societies (1977), Lijphart demonstrates that democracy can be achieved and maintained in countries with deep religious, ideological, linguistic, cultural, or ethnic cleavages if elites opt for a set of institutions that are distinctive of consociational democracy.

In this book, Lijphart defines a consociational democracy in terms of four characteristics: (1) "government by grand coalition of the political leaders of all significant segments of the plural society," (2) "the mutual veto", (3) proportionality, and (4) "a high degree of autonomy of each segment to run its own internal affairs."

Lijphart's work challenged the then influential view that democracy could only be stable in countries with a homogenous political culture.

Beginning with his book Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian & Consensus Government in Twenty-one Countries (1984), Lijphart focused on the broader contrast between majoritarian democracy and consensus democracy.

While Lijphart advocated consociationalism primarily for societies deeply divided along ethnic, religious, ideological, or other cleavages, he sees consensus democracy as appropriate for any society with a consensual political culture.

In contrast to majoritarian democracies, consensus democracies have multiparty systems, parliamentarism with oversized (and therefore inclusive) cabinet coalitions, proportional electoral systems, corporatist (hierarchical) interest group structures, federal structures, bicameralism, rigid constitutions protected by judicial review, and independent central banks.

These institutions ensure, firstly, that only a broad supermajority can control policy and, secondly, that once a coalition takes power, its ability to infringe on minority rights is limited.

In Patterns of Democracy (1999, 2nd ed., 2012), Lijphart classifies thirty-six democracies using these attributes.

He finds consensus democracies to be "kinder, gentler" states, having lower incarceration rates, less use of the death penalty, better care for the environment, more foreign aid work, and more welfare spending – qualities he feels "should appeal to all democrats".

He also finds that consensus democracies have a less abrasive political culture, more functional business-like proceedings, and a results-oriented ethic.

He became a professor emeritus at UCSD in 2000.

Dutch by birth, he has spent most of his working life in the United States and became an American citizen.

He has since regained his Dutch citizenship and is now a dual citizen of both the Netherlands and the United States.

Over his career, Lijphart has received many awards and honors:

Lijphart has also received honorary doctorate from Leiden University (2001), Queen's University Belfast (2004), and Ghent University (2009).

Lijphart is the leading authority on consociationalism, or the ways in which segmented societies manage to sustain democracy through power-sharing.

The 2012 edition included data up to 2010 and found proportional representation (PR) was vastly superior for the "quality of democracy", being statistically significantly better for 19 of 19 indicators.

On the issue of "effective government" 16 out of 17 indicators pointed to PR as superior, with 9 out of 17 statistically significant.

These results held up when controlling for the level of development and population size.

Peter Gourevitch and Gary Jacobson argue that Lijphart's work on democracy make him "the world's leading theorist of democracy in sharply divided societies."

Nils-Christian Bormann claims that "Arend Lijphart's typology of democratic systems has been one of the major contributions to comparative political science in the last decades."

Gerardo L. Munck and Richard Snyder hold that "Arend Lijphart is a leading empirical democratic theorist who reintroduced the study of political institutions into comparative politics in the wake of the behavioral revolution."