A Study On Arend Lijphart's Theory Of Consensus Democracy

This article mainly concentrates on Lijphart's theory of Consensus Democracy. Since the 1980s and 1990s of the 20^th century, Liberal Democracy confronted unprecedented crisis in western democratic countries. In the age of globalization around by the Neo-Liberalism, Liberal Democracy model was choosed by many of the 3^rd world countries, but the consequences was sharply contrasted with the western democratic countries. This situation made many democratic theoreticians think over it, Lijphart's theory of Consensus Democracy was just the result of that reflection. He not only pointed out that the main form of Liberal Democracy was Majoritarian Democracy, which had intense exclusiveness, competitiveness and adversary, and was the reason that why the democratic systems lacked of vigor in many western countries, and why many of the 3^rd world countries couldn't establish and maintain democratic systems; but also replaced Majoritarian Democracy with Consensus Democracy, which main ideas were divided-power and joint-power, and had intense inclusiveness, bargaining and compromise.Lijphart contrasted Consensus Democracy and Majoritarian Democracysystematically from two dimensions --executives-parties dimension andfederal-unitary dimension--of which ten institutional characteristics consisted.And he also drew a conclusion that Consensus Democracy was superior to Majoritarian Democracy as a whole by analysing 36 democratic countries comparatively. This conclusion broke the conventional wisdom concerning the paradox between the representation and the efficiency of democratic system. At the same time, it widened the field of vision about democracy. Some articles published in our country referred to Lijphart's Consensus Democracy, but had some mistakes in a certain extend. And Consensus Democracy was full of consensus and collaboration, which was in accordance with Chinese's traditional spiri--harmony. In order to understand Lijphart's Consensus Democracy well, this article will discuss the background, the forming process, the institutional design, the quality and the government performance of Consensus Democracy. At last, there are a review about Consensus Democracy and some enlightenment to our democratic system.