Matthijs Bogaards
Biographic Data
| ID | 259761 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Matthijs Bogaards |
| GIVEN NAMES | Matthijs |
| FAMILY NAME | Bogaards |
| SIGNATURE | BOGAARDS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Central European University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8026-0862 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 748 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 49 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
The False Promise of Liberal Consociations
It has become common to distinguish between two types of consociations. Liberal consociations, which leave open which groups will share power and enjoy autonomy, are generally considered “good”. In contrast, corporate consociations are viewed as “bad” because they institutionalize ethnic politics. This paper challenges these assumptions. It shows that the advantages of liberal consociations have been overstated and the downsides of corporate cons…
Declining Democracy in East-Central Europe: The Divide in the EU and Emerging Hard Populism; Awakening Europe in the Triple Global Crisis: The Birth Pangs of the Emerging Europe
Refreshing Our Memory of a Classic: Mansfield and Snyder’s Electing to Fight
Consociationalism and the State
The state has never been a central category in consociational analysis, but recent developments have put the state on the radar of consociational scholars. This article is the first to survey and systematize insights on the role of the state in consociational theory and practice. The article does so by providing an overview and review of the answers to three guiding questions. First, who owns the state? Second, what comes first—consociation or st…
Gendering De‐Democratization: Gender and Illiberalism in Post‐Communist Europe
Many observers have written with concern about a growing “opposition to gender equality,” “anti‐gender campaigns,” and even a “war on gender.” Often, these trends take place in countries that are witnessing a decline in democratic quality, a process captured by such labels as “democratic erosion,” “democratic backsliding,” or “autocratization.” This thematic issue brings together literature on gender equality and de‐democratization with an emphas…
Feminist institutionalism(s)
Over the past 10 years, feminist scholarship has made important contributions to the new institutionalism in political science. This literature has developed into two directions. Some scholars have sought to gender existing approaches, resulting in feminist historical institutionalism, feminist sociological institutionalism, feminist discursive institutionalism, and even feminist rational choice institutionalism. Others have tried to sketch a fem…
The European Union: Consociational Past, Centripetal Future
Consociational interpretations of the European Union (EU) are well established and help to explain the political stability of the 27-member state system. In contrast, the increasingly common centripetal elements have not yet received systematic attention. Using a framework originally designed to map the choices for divided societies, this article highlights centripetalism in EU party regulation and proposals for electoral reform. Going beyond the…
Militant Consociational Democracy: The Political Exclusion of the Extreme Right in Belgium
Gero Erdmann-Preis für vergleichende Area-Forschung 2020
Iraq’s Constitution of 2005: The Case Against Consociationalism ‘Light’
Scholars and practitioners tend to favor transitory power-sharing arrangements and liberal forms of consociationalism. Iraq’s constitution of 2005 has both, but the country has been in turmoil ever since. This article argues that Iraq’s political problems can be traced, in part, to the combination of temporary and liberal consociationalism, what is called here consociationalism ‘light’. The lack of durable national power sharing, the preoccupatio…
Formal and Informal Consociational Institutions: A Comparison of the National Pact and the Taif Agreement in Lebanon
In the past decades, New Institutionalism in political science has rekindled an interest in the role of institutions and has theorized the interaction between formal and informal institutions. Unfortunately, little of this has made its way into the consociational literature. This article brings together the two bodies of work, focusing on the case of Lebanon because it allows for a unique analysis over time of the different ways in which consocia…
Rethinking the value of democracy: A comparative perspective
Rethinking the value of democracy: a comparative perspective." Democratization, 26(8), pp. 1536–1537
Consociationalism and Centripetalism: Friends or Foes
Two schools dominate the literature on democracy in divided societies: consociationalism and centripetalism. The first advocates group representation and power sharing while the second recommends institutions that promote multi‐ethnic parties. Although often presented as mutually exclusive choices, in reality many new democracies display a mix. Drawing on the experiences of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Fiji, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Northern Ir…
Case-based research on democratization
Empirical research on democratization is dominated by case studies and small-N comparisons. This article is a first attempt to take stock of qualitative case-based research on democratization. It finds that most articles use methods implicitly rather than explicitly and are disconnected from the burgeoning literature on case-based methodology. This makes it difficult to summarize the substantive findings or to evaluate the contributions of the va…
The Importance of Consociationalism for Twenty‐First Century Politics and Political Science
Five decades after the term consociationalism made its debut in the comparative politics of divided societies, the huge body of international literature it has sparked continues to grow. In an era of populism and polarization, interest in the many facets of consociationalism is at an all‐time high. This introduction to the special issue of Half a Century of Consociationalism: Cases and Comparisons gives an impression of the contemporary state of …
Coding, Concessions, Conclusions: A Reply to Matt Qvortrup
This article responds to:Kinder, Gentler, Safer? A Re-Examination of the Relationship between Consensus Democracy and Domestic Terrorism
Kinder, Gentler, Safer? A Re-Examination of the Relationship between Consensus Democracy and Domestic Terrorism
Can inclusive institutions tame the threat of domestic terrorism? In a series of recent publications, the political scientists Arend Lijphart and Matt Qvortrup claim that consensus democracies are not only kinder and gentler, but also safer: consensus democracies are less likely to experience deadly domestic terrorism and when they do, they suffer fewer fatalities than majoritarian democracies. This article reexamines the logic and the evidence. …
Deliberative Democracy and Electoral Reform in South Africa: A Campus Experiment
In the transition to an inclusive democracy, South Africa changed its electoral system for the national parliament to proportional representation. Ever since, there have been suggestions of electoral reform. So far, the debate has rarely involved ordinary citizens. This article presents the results of a Deliberation Day on Electoral Reform in South Africa at the University of Cape Town. This campus experiment in deliberative democracy was part of…
Making waves: Democratic contention in Europe and Latin American since the revolutions of 1848, by Kurt Weyland
Making waves: democratic contention in Europe and Latin American since the revolutions of 1848, by Kurt Weyland." Democratization, 25(2), pp. 376–377
De-democratization in Hungary: Diffusely Defective Democracy
Scholarly attention has started to shift from democratization and democratic consolidation to trends of democratic deconsolidation, backsliding, regression, and erosion. This article examines Hungary as a deviant and exemplary case for understanding de-democratization. The starting point is the literature on defective democracy, which provides a unified framework of analysis for the causes and the outcomes of democratization. However, as the case…
Consociationalism
According to its advocates, consociationalism helps to secure democracy and social peace in divided societies. According to its critics, power‐sharing arrangements and local autonomy reinforce societal divisions. They see consociationalism as a transitory remedy at best, especially useful in postconflict societies. In today's world, most new consociations have emerged after civil war.
Lessons from Brexit and Trump: Populism is what happens when political parties lose control
Democratization and Competitive Authoritarianism in Africa
Democratization and Competitive Authoritarianism in Africa
Comparative Political Regimes: Consensus and Majoritarian Democracy
Ever since Aristotle, the comparative study of political regimes and their performance has relied on classifications and typologies. The study of democracy today has been influenced heavily by Arend Lijphart’s typology of consensus versus majoritarian democracy. Scholars have applied it to more than 100 countries and sought to demonstrate its impact on no less than 70 dependent variables. This paper summarizes our knowledge about the origins, fun…
How to classify hybrid regimes? Defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism
The 'third wave' of democratization has resulted in the proliferation of regimes that are neither fully democratic nor classic authoritarian. To capture the nature of these hybrid regimes, the democratization literature has come up with a wide variety of adjectives as descriptors of different forms of democracy and authoritarianism. This article reviews two of the most systematic recent approaches, centring on the concepts of 'defective democracy…
De-democratization in Hungary: Diffusely Defective Democracy
Scholarly attention has started to shift from democratization and democratic consolidation to trends of democratic deconsolidation, backsliding, regression, and erosion. This article examines Hungary as a deviant and exemplary case for understanding de-democratization. The starting point is the literature on defective democracy, which provides a unified framework of analysis for the causes and the outcomes of democratization. However, as the case…
Counting parties and identifying dominant party systems in Africa
By most definitions, the third wave of democratisation has given rise to dominant parties and dominant party systems in Africa. The effective number of parties, the most widely used method to count parties, does not adequately capture this fact. An analysis of 59 election results in 18 sub‐Saharan African countries shows that classifications of party systems on the basis of the effective number of parties are problematic and often flawed. Some of…
The Uneasy Relationship between Empirical and Normative Types in Consociational Theory
Consociationalism has enriched comparative politics with a whole lineage of non-majoritarian types of democracy: from consociational democracy to consensus democracy and power-sharing. This article unravels the development, interaction and succession of empirical and normative typologies in 30 years of consociational literature as embodied in the work of Lijphart. It argues that consociational theory is plagued by serious conceptual problems whic…
Dominant Party Systems and Electoral Volatility in Africa: A Comment on Mozaffar and Scarritt
In a recent publication in this journal, Mozaffar and Scarritt claim to have found a puzzling combination of low fragmentation and high volatility in African party systems. However, if we look at national party systems rather than Africa-wide averages, include regime type as a variable and specify dominance, we find three different constellations: dominant party systems with relatively low volatility, non-dominant and pulverized party systems wit…
Where to draw the line? From degree to dichotomy in measures of democracy
While there is much debate about the merits of dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy, surprisingly little attention is paid to the question as to how to go from degree to dichotomy. This study identifies no less than 38 different ways in which Freedom House and Polity scores have been used to distinguish between democracies and non-democracies. The analysis shows that it is difficult to draw the line in measures of democracy, even f…
Measures of Democratization: From Degree to Type to War
The global spread of democracy has not resulted in scholarly consensus on how to conceptualize and measure democratization. The recent proliferation of hybrid regimes has encouraged attempts to empirically capture these new categories with the help of existing measures of democracy, raising the question of how one can go from degree to type. This issue has gained in salience because of the claim that incomplete democratic transitions, stopping ha…
Electoral choices for divided societies: Multi-ethnic parties and constituency pooling in Africa
The third wave of democratisation has given new impetus to the debate about the choice of electoral system in divided societies. The growing preference for proportional representation has been dented by Horowitz's advocacy of 'vote pooling' through the alternative vote. However, the conditions in most African polities are unfavourable to the working of the alternative vote. This article seeks to reveal the hidden potential in Horowitz's analysis …
Crafting competitive party systems: Electoral laws and the opposition in Africa
Published online: 26 Sep 2007
Consociational Interpretations of the European Union
Ethnic party bans in Africa: An Introduction
During the 1990s the number of African states allowing multiparty elections increased dramatically. Paradoxically, this has been accompanied in the majority of countries by legal bans on ethnic and other particularistic parties. The main official reason has been the aim of preventing the politicization of ethnicity as this is feared to lead to ethnic conflict and political instability. Despite the resurgent interest in institutional engineering, …
Formal and Informal Consociational Institutions: A Comparison of the National Pact and the Taif Agreement in Lebanon
In the past decades, New Institutionalism in political science has rekindled an interest in the role of institutions and has theorized the interaction between formal and informal institutions. Unfortunately, little of this has made its way into the consociational literature. This article brings together the two bodies of work, focusing on the case of Lebanon because it allows for a unique analysis over time of the different ways in which consocia…
Exchange: Reexamining African Elections
In the new millennium the democratizing force of elections is contested. Different from the growing literature on electoral authoritarianism, Staffan Lindberg has argued that in Africa, elections are a new mode of democratic transition. Attempts to replicate his findings for other regions have failed, raising the question whether perhaps Africa is unique. This paper reexamines the evidence and finds that in Africa, too, democratization by electio…
Consociationalism and Centripetalism: Friends or Foes
Two schools dominate the literature on democracy in divided societies: consociationalism and centripetalism. The first advocates group representation and power sharing while the second recommends institutions that promote multi‐ethnic parties. Although often presented as mutually exclusive choices, in reality many new democracies display a mix. Drawing on the experiences of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Fiji, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Northern Ir…
Ethnic party bans and institutional engineering in Nigeria
Nigeria is the African country that implemented ethnic party bans most systematically. At different points in time, a total of at least 64 parties has been denied registration for failing to demonstrate ‘national presence’. Nigeria is also the African country with the longest record in institutional engineering. Ethnic party bans are one instrument in a broader repertoire of incentives for the creation of national parties that transcend the manif…
Measuring Democracy through Election Outcomes: A Critique with African Data
Cross-national measures of democracy are widely used to track the development and spread of democracy around the world and to study the causes and correlates of democratization. Most of the best-known democracy indexes have a component on election outcomes. In many measures, election outcomes make a significant contribution to a country's overall rating, and in some, the outcomes are even decisive. However, in the first empirical test of this rel…
The Importance of Consociationalism for Twenty‐First Century Politics and Political Science
Five decades after the term consociationalism made its debut in the comparative politics of divided societies, the huge body of international literature it has sparked continues to grow. In an era of populism and polarization, interest in the many facets of consociationalism is at an all‐time high. This introduction to the special issue of Half a Century of Consociationalism: Cases and Comparisons gives an impression of the contemporary state of …
The Choice for Proportional Representation: Electoral System Design in Peace Agreements
After a civil war, there is a keen interest in ‘getting the institutions right’. This article summarizes our knowledge of one particular institution, the electoral system, through a review of the literature on power sharing and electoral systems in post-conflict societies. Surprisingly, there is little statistical support for the conviction that proportional representation (PR) contributes to inclusive political institutions and thereby to peace …
The Italian First Republic: Degenerated Consociationalism’ in a Polarised Party System
Italy's post-war political system has been analysed as a case of consociational democracy, albeit of a special kind. Not cultural segmentation, but ideological polarisation was the main source of division, giving rise to a distinct pattern of elite cooperation captured with such terms as 'consociativismo' and 'degenerated consociationalism'. This paper examines the origins, dynamics, and outcomes of 'consociationalism Italian style' through a sys…
Iraq’s Constitution of 2005: The Case Against Consociationalism ‘Light’
Scholars and practitioners tend to favor transitory power-sharing arrangements and liberal forms of consociationalism. Iraq’s constitution of 2005 has both, but the country has been in turmoil ever since. This article argues that Iraq’s political problems can be traced, in part, to the combination of temporary and liberal consociationalism, what is called here consociationalism ‘light’. The lack of durable national power sharing, the preoccupatio…
Feminist institutionalism(s)
Over the past 10 years, feminist scholarship has made important contributions to the new institutionalism in political science. This literature has developed into two directions. Some scholars have sought to gender existing approaches, resulting in feminist historical institutionalism, feminist sociological institutionalism, feminist discursive institutionalism, and even feminist rational choice institutionalism. Others have tried to sketch a fem…
Case-based research on democratization
Empirical research on democratization is dominated by case studies and small-N comparisons. This article is a first attempt to take stock of qualitative case-based research on democratization. It finds that most articles use methods implicitly rather than explicitly and are disconnected from the burgeoning literature on case-based methodology. This makes it difficult to summarize the substantive findings or to evaluate the contributions of the va…
Elections, Election Outcomes, and Democracy in Southern Africa
Elections and election outcomes are widely used as a convenient short cut to measuring democracy. If this were correct, information on elections and election outcomes would be a time- and cost-saving means of identifying regime type. However, this article shows that the influential democracy measures of Beck et al., Ferree and Singh, Przeworski et al., and Vanhanen fail to adequately identify regime type when applied to ten countries in Southern …
Consociationalism and the State
The state has never been a central category in consociational analysis, but recent developments have put the state on the radar of consociational scholars. This article is the first to survey and systematize insights on the role of the state in consociational theory and practice. The article does so by providing an overview and review of the answers to three guiding questions. First, who owns the state? Second, what comes first—consociation or st…
Gendering De‐Democratization: Gender and Illiberalism in Post‐Communist Europe
Many observers have written with concern about a growing “opposition to gender equality,” “anti‐gender campaigns,” and even a “war on gender.” Often, these trends take place in countries that are witnessing a decline in democratic quality, a process captured by such labels as “democratic erosion,” “democratic backsliding,” or “autocratization.” This thematic issue brings together literature on gender equality and de‐democratization with an emphas…
The favourable factors for consociational democracy: A review
The favourable factors for the establishment and maintenance of consociational democracy are among the most contested elements of consociationalism. The debate concerns both the favourable factors themselves and their status. The debate over the former is provoked by the inductive character; the debate over the latter can be traced back to an unresolved conflict between deterministic and voluntaristic elements in consociational theory. What is at…
The Uneasy Relationship between Empirical and Normative Types in Consociational Theory
Consociationalism has enriched comparative politics with a whole lineage of non-majoritarian types of democracy: from consociational democracy to consensus democracy and power-sharing. This article unravels the development, interaction and succession of empirical and normative typologies in 30 years of consociational literature as embodied in the work of Lijphart. It argues that consociational theory is plagued by serious conceptual problems whic…
Crafting competitive party systems: Electoral laws and the opposition in Africa
Published online: 26 Sep 2007
The Consociational Analogy of the European Union: A Rejoinder to Crepaz with a Comment on Kaiser
Consociational Interpretations of the European Union
Electoral choices for divided societies: Multi-ethnic parties and constituency pooling in Africa
The third wave of democratisation has given new impetus to the debate about the choice of electoral system in divided societies. The growing preference for proportional representation has been dented by Horowitz's advocacy of 'vote pooling' through the alternative vote. However, the conditions in most African polities are unfavourable to the working of the alternative vote. This article seeks to reveal the hidden potential in Horowitz's analysis …
Counting parties and identifying dominant party systems in Africa
By most definitions, the third wave of democratisation has given rise to dominant parties and dominant party systems in Africa. The effective number of parties, the most widely used method to count parties, does not adequately capture this fact. An analysis of 59 election results in 18 sub‐Saharan African countries shows that classifications of party systems on the basis of the effective number of parties are problematic and often flawed. Some of…
The Italian First Republic: Degenerated Consociationalism’ in a Polarised Party System
Italy's post-war political system has been analysed as a case of consociational democracy, albeit of a special kind. Not cultural segmentation, but ideological polarisation was the main source of division, giving rise to a distinct pattern of elite cooperation captured with such terms as 'consociativismo' and 'degenerated consociationalism'. This paper examines the origins, dynamics, and outcomes of 'consociationalism Italian style' through a sys…
Elections, Election Outcomes, and Democracy in Southern Africa
Elections and election outcomes are widely used as a convenient short cut to measuring democracy. If this were correct, information on elections and election outcomes would be a time- and cost-saving means of identifying regime type. However, this article shows that the influential democracy measures of Beck et al., Ferree and Singh, Przeworski et al., and Vanhanen fail to adequately identify regime type when applied to ten countries in Southern …
Measuring Democracy through Election Outcomes: A Critique with African Data
Cross-national measures of democracy are widely used to track the development and spread of democracy around the world and to study the causes and correlates of democratization. Most of the best-known democracy indexes have a component on election outcomes. In many measures, election outcomes make a significant contribution to a country's overall rating, and in some, the outcomes are even decisive. However, in the first empirical test of this rel…
Dominant Party Systems and Electoral Volatility in Africa: A Comment on Mozaffar and Scarritt
In a recent publication in this journal, Mozaffar and Scarritt claim to have found a puzzling combination of low fragmentation and high volatility in African party systems. However, if we look at national party systems rather than Africa-wide averages, include regime type as a variable and specify dominance, we find three different constellations: dominant party systems with relatively low volatility, non-dominant and pulverized party systems wit…
How to classify hybrid regimes? Defective democracy and electoral authoritarianism
The 'third wave' of democratization has resulted in the proliferation of regimes that are neither fully democratic nor classic authoritarian. To capture the nature of these hybrid regimes, the democratization literature has come up with a wide variety of adjectives as descriptors of different forms of democracy and authoritarianism. This article reviews two of the most systematic recent approaches, centring on the concepts of 'defective democracy…
Measures of Democratization: From Degree to Type to War
The global spread of democracy has not resulted in scholarly consensus on how to conceptualize and measure democratization. The recent proliferation of hybrid regimes has encouraged attempts to empirically capture these new categories with the help of existing measures of democracy, raising the question of how one can go from degree to type. This issue has gained in salience because of the claim that incomplete democratic transitions, stopping ha…
Ethnic party bans in Africa: An Introduction
During the 1990s the number of African states allowing multiparty elections increased dramatically. Paradoxically, this has been accompanied in the majority of countries by legal bans on ethnic and other particularistic parties. The main official reason has been the aim of preventing the politicization of ethnicity as this is feared to lead to ethnic conflict and political instability. Despite the resurgent interest in institutional engineering, …
Ethnic party bans and institutional engineering in Nigeria
Nigeria is the African country that implemented ethnic party bans most systematically. At different points in time, a total of at least 64 parties has been denied registration for failing to demonstrate ‘national presence’. Nigeria is also the African country with the longest record in institutional engineering. Ethnic party bans are one instrument in a broader repertoire of incentives for the creation of national parties that transcend the manif…
Oligarchy
Where to draw the line? From degree to dichotomy in measures of democracy
While there is much debate about the merits of dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy, surprisingly little attention is paid to the question as to how to go from degree to dichotomy. This study identifies no less than 38 different ways in which Freedom House and Polity scores have been used to distinguish between democracies and non-democracies. The analysis shows that it is difficult to draw the line in measures of democracy, even f…
Ethnic Party Bans in Africa
1. Ethnic party bans in Africa: an introduction 2. Party bans in Africa - an empirical overview 3. Understanding variations in party bans in Africa 4. An effective measure of institutional engineering? Ethnic party bans in Africa 5. Why there is no party ban in the South African constitution 6. Political party bans in Rwanda 1994-2003: three narratives of justification 7. Ethnic party bans and institutional engineering in Nigeria 8. Comparing eth…
The Choice for Proportional Representation: Electoral System Design in Peace Agreements
After a civil war, there is a keen interest in ‘getting the institutions right’. This article summarizes our knowledge of one particular institution, the electoral system, through a review of the literature on power sharing and electoral systems in post-conflict societies. Surprisingly, there is little statistical support for the conviction that proportional representation (PR) contributes to inclusive political institutions and thereby to peace …
Adrienne LeBas, From protest to parties: Party-building and democratization in Africa, reviewed by Matthijs Bogaards
Ethnic Party Bans in Africa
Exchange: Reexamining African Elections
In the new millennium the democratizing force of elections is contested. Different from the growing literature on electoral authoritarianism, Staffan Lindberg has argued that in Africa, elections are a new mode of democratic transition. Attempts to replicate his findings for other regions have failed, raising the question whether perhaps Africa is unique. This paper reexamines the evidence and finds that in Africa, too, democratization by electio…
Struggling for recognition: The Psychological Impetus for Democratic Progress
Struggling for recognition: the psychological impetus for democratic progress." Democratization, 21(4), pp. 767–768
Making a difference: An interview with Arend Lijphart
Democratization and Competitive Authoritarianism in Africa
Political science (45 works) · Law (42 works) · Politics (42 works) · Sociology (40 works) · Political economy (37 works) · Democracy (34 works) · Law (33 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (25 works) · Economics (24 works) · Democratization (14 works)