A MULTIPARTY SYSTEM WITHOUT A DOMINANT PARTY AS A PREREQUISITE FOR A MORE SUCCESSFUL CONSOCIATION – A COMPARATIVE REVIEW

Abstract

In political science, there is a principled consensus that the full functioning of the consociational model of democracy, so-called power-sharing, requires the existence of a multiparty system. But certain authors go a step further saying that not whoever multiparty system is appropriate for the countries of consociational democracy, but a multiparty system without a dominant party. This is also the main thesis of this paper. Hence, to process it, the paper is structured as follows: first, a theoretical overview will be given of the typologies of party systems that exist in political science, then through the prism of the so-called Laakso-Taagepera index (L-T index) for the effective number parties (ENP), named after the Estonian scientists of the same name, will be reviewed the party systems of the paradigmatic European ‟case studies” - the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland, as well as the newly formed consociations - Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and the Republic of North Macedonia (RNM). The time segment for the analysis of election cycles and the effective number of parliamentary parties (ENPP) in these selected cases is derived as follows: 1. For the Netherlands, the focus is from the introduction of the proportional model in 1917 to 1967, that is, the so-called period of sixty years of consociation; 2. For Belgium from the elections after the First World War, with particular emphasis on the election cycles in the 70s, 80s and 90s, when with the six constitutional reforms the country became a federal and full-blooded consociation; 3. For Switzerland, since the introduction of the proportion in 1918, with a particular focus on the election cycles after the introduction of the so-called “magical formula” for the determination of the composition of the Federal Council (1959); 4. For BiH and RNM, the election cycles after the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA) and the Ohrid Framework Agreement (OFA), when consociational elements were introduced into their political systems. From the analysis made, on the one hand, it will be confirmed that in all selected cases, except RSM, in “the lion’s share” of the election cycles, indeed the ENPP index indicated multipartyism without a dominant party. On the other hand, it will be shown that the RNM does not fit into the definition of a typical consociation with a multiparty system without a dominant party, because its party system after the OFA according to the L-T index for the ENPP is a typical two-and-a-half party system. Therefore, it is more correct to speak of the totality of the Macedonian political system as a kind of ‟hybrid” of elements of parliamentary and consociational democracy, rather than a ‟pure” consociation.