ABSTRACT
Consociational democracy is a concept coined in the 1960s to define a special type of political regime. It was introduced to solve the puzzle of democratic stability in deeply divided countries. It means ‘government by elite cartel to turn a democracy with a fragmented political culture into a stable democracy’ (Lijphart 1969: 216). In the early days of consociational democracy theory, Belgium was seen as one of its foremost examples. In this contribution we would like to see whether and to what extent the Belgian political system of the early twenty-first century can still be considered a consociational democracy. In other words, can consociational democracy theory still teach us something about Belgium, and, conversely, can the Belgian case teach us something about the status and the usefulness of the theory?
