ABSTRACT
Introduction: the expansion of consensus democracies For consensus democracies, one important source of strength is the fact that their national patterns of behaviour have been extended to the subnational level over the past 200 years. All of our five cases have developed similar power-sharing cultures based on proportional representation and compromise. However, this expansion of the consensus democracy is expressed differently in different countries. There is also the strong possibility that divergent patterns of regional and local democracy will emerge within the same country. This chapter first analyses the simpler multi-level unitary systems of the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and then turns to the more complex federal systems of Austria, Switzerland and (more recently) Belgium. Finally, some conclusions will be drawn.
