Arend Lijphart and the Transformation of Irish Democracy

This article assesses the extent to which institutional change has produced a consensus democracy in the Republic of Ireland. It measures this change over time, examining each of the variables Lijphart associates with the distinction between majoritarian and consensus democracy. We show that the Irish system is moving away from its Westminster roots, but some variables on the executive–parties dimension have hardly changed at all. Hence, we relate the Irish preference for ‘divided power’ forms of consensus democracy to the strong British imprint on the state's core legislative institutions.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor Nick Sitter for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. The formula used to calculate Effective number of parties: where s_i represents the portion of seats of the i-th party.

2. Gallagher Index calculated using the following formula where v_i is vote percentages for each party and s_i is the seat percentages.

3. (a) These refer to votes on proposals to amend separate articles on the constitution, even if the votes were held on the same day. The official view is that each time the government wishes to change or amend the constitution, it must do it by holding a referendum. A referendum gives the people of Ireland the opportunity to express their opinion and vote for or against the proposed change or amendment. This means each vote on an amendment must be considered a separate referendum. (b) If we counted only the separate occasions when people voted on such issues the figures would be period one 1: period two 4: period three 13 referendums: still a clear result. Source: The All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, ‘Appendix One: Statistics on Referendums’. Sixth Progress Report: The Referendum (November 2001), pp.40–41.

4. Score calculation procedure: In order to express each variable in similar units, the score for each variable per period was transformed into a normalised range with a mean of zero and standard deviation of 1.

	where: x is the variable; [xbar]is the mean of the variable; σ is the standard deviation.
	Where a higher score for a variable represented less consensus (e.g. % of one-party cabinet), the signs were reversed. An equal weighted average of each variable was taken to derive the compound score for each dimension. The average score across the three periods was then standardised using the same formula above.