ABSTRACT
Consociational theory has had a significant impact on the comparative study of West European democracies. There are, however, a few countries outside Western Europe which have received attention from scholars of consociational democracy and have been identified as consociational at some point in their history, among them Lebanon, Colombia, Malaysia and Uruguay. Regrettably, consociational practices in most of these countries were unable to fulfill their basic role of maintaining political stability amid a deeply fragmented political culture.
