Weimar Germany and the French Fourth Republic are the historical examples that are referred to most often. Centrifugal democracy ( lower right) is the situation in which deep social divisions are not compensated for by elite cooperation, causing deadlock in the short term and breakdown of democratic government in the long term. The United Kingdom and United States are examples. The first solution to the puzzle of stable democracy, in which social cleavages do not reinforce each other and in which, therefore, political elites can be allowed to compete, is called centripetal democracy ( Figure 1, lower left). Both social segmentation and elite cooperation are continua, but when we dichotomize these two dimensions for the sake of presentation, four ideal types result ( Figure 1). The contribution of consociationalism to democratic theory is to explain these deviant cases by showing that social heterogeneity need not be balanced at the same (mass) level it can also be compensated for at the elite level, by cooperation rather than competition between political elites. Yet, there are countries where stable democracy and social segmentation do coexist. This is a democratic option only if the dominant group is in a majority, but because social cleavages are relatively long lasting, it would condemn the minority groups to permanent exclusion from power, which hardly seems viable as a long-term solution to the puzzle of stable democracy. One way to avoid the breakdown of democratic stability that could result is for one social group to be able to dominate the others ( Lustick 1979). In such a segmented or deeply divided society, the social groups are likely to develop into antagonistic subcultures. Sometimes, the social cleavages coincide and reinforce each other, as when, in the example above, all religious citizens belong to the working class and all secular citizens belong to the upper or middle class. Not all democracies meet this requirement. The existence of both centrifugal forces (social cleavages) and centripetal forces (cross pressures) at the mass level solves the puzzle of stable democracy.
The individual is pulled in different directions he or she is cross-pressured, experiencing cross-cutting loyalties, which supposedly have a moderating effect on political views, in turn reducing the intensity of political conflicts. Thus, in his trade union a church member interacts with secular working-class comrades, and in his church he encounters upper- and middle-class brethren. social groups that are homogeneous with respect to one social cleavage are heterogeneous with respect to another. Social cleavages can be rendered harmless by cross-cutting each other, i.e. The pluralist theory of cross pressures provides an answer to the simultaneous needs for homogeneity and heterogeneity. The same conflicting views that are the lifeblood of democracy are also threatening to its stability ( Diamond 1993:24,29–32). The puzzle of stable democracy is this: Stability is fostered by the absence of conflict in society, and thus by social and cultural homogeneity representative democracy, on the other hand, presupposes at least a modicum of disagreement and contestation. The erosion of social cleavages in many consociational democracies raises the question of whether the very logic of consociationalism should lead to a prescription of more adversarial politics in those countries.
These debates can become more fruitful if consociational theory is formulated less inductively and at a higher level of abstraction, and if the critics of consociationalism focus more on its principles and less on the operationalizations provided by its most important theorist, Arend Lijphart. Consociationalism has always been controversial, but rather than one great debate about its validity, there have been many small debates about the countries, the concepts, the causes, and the consequences associated with consociationalism. The theory was extended as new consociational democracies were discovered, as the related but broader concept of “consensus democracy” was introduced, and as a normative component was added, recommending consociational engineering as the most promising way to achieve stable democracy in strongly segmented societies. It argued that in these countries, the destabilizing effects of subcultural segmentation are neutralized at the elite level by embracing non-majoritarian mechanisms for conflict resolution. Consociationalist theory served initially as an explanation of political stability in a few deeply divided European democracies.
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