How Consensual Are Consensus Democracies? A Reconsideration of the Consensus/Majoritarian Dichotomy and a Comparison of Legislative Roll-Call Vote Consensus Levels from Sixteen Countries

In the following study, I develop two new institutional dimensions of consensus/majoritarian democracies, building on the variables of the two forms of democracy identified by Lijphart. Based on these two new dimensions, I establish a classification of consensual regime types and winnow out two permutations which would most closely approximate the ideal of domestic social conflict resolution, and could also more plausibly be explained by irenic cultural norms, rather than institutional mechanisms. Then I conduct an empirical investigation to assess whether there is a correlation between consensus or majoritarian democracies and average levels of legislative roll-call vote consensus acquired over time. My results suggest that proportional representation and ideological cohesion are not in tension with one another, as the opponents of PR would have us believe, and in fact may be more amenable to consensus building and ideological cohesion than their majoritarian counterparts. Interested researchers should aim to substantiate the correlation between consensual institutions and outcomes, and then conduct thicker investigations in order to determine whether consensual outcomes in consensus democracies can be explained by institutional mechanisms, or if, more ideally, irenic cultural norms might be at work. _____________________________________________________________________________