ABSTRACT
The bulk of this volume is concerned with the degree and nature of change in the four West European countries which have figured prominently in the literature on consociationalism. Using as his point of departure Lijphart’s early theory (Lijphart 1968a, 1968b and 1969), Luther (1992, 1997b and Chapter 1 of this volume) has deduced the role which parties and party systems might be expected to play in consociational democracies. These roles are then examined in five single-country studies and three comparative chapters. Luther explicitly rules out Lijphart’s later work, in which he extended his focus to embrace a much wider range of countries and of political phenomena and developed a distinction between ‘majoritarian’ and ‘consensus’democracies (Lijphart 1984a:1-36 and 207-22).
