290 8 BALLOTS NOT BULLETS: TESTING CONSOCIATIONAL THEORIES OF ETHNIC CONFLICT, ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND DEMOCRATIZATION Pippa Norris Some of the most difficult issues facing established and new democracies concern the management of ethnic conflict. The familiar litany of problems ranges from the inclusion of diverse racial groups in South Africa and Namibia to long-standing tensions between Catholic and Protestant communities in Northern Ireland, violence in the Basque region, the Palestine and the Balkans, and the dramatic eruption of bloody wars in Rwanda, Kashmir, and East Timor. Ethnic identities can be best understood as social constructs with deep cultural and psychological roots based on national, cultural-linguistic, racial, or religious backgrounds.1 They provide an affective sense of belonging and are socially defined in terms of their meaning for the actors, representing ties of blood, soil, faith, and community. Agencies concerned with the peaceful amelioration of such antagonisms have increasingly turned towards ‘constitutional engineering’ or291‘institutional design’ to achieve these ends. The aim has been to develop rules of the game structuring political competition so that actors have in-built incentives to accommodate the interests of different cultural groups, leading to conflict management, ethnic cooperation, and long-term political stability. One of the most influential accounts in the literature has been provided by the theory of ‘consociational’ or ‘consensus’ democracy developed by Arend Lijphart, which suggests that nations can maintain stable governments despite being deeply divided into distinct ethnic, linguistic, religious, or cultural communities.2 Consociational systems are characterized by institutions facilitating cooperation and compromise among political leaders, maximizing the number of ‘winners’ in the system, so that separate communities can peacefully coexist within the common borders of a single nation-state. Electoral systems represent perhaps the most powerful instrument available for institutional engineering, with far-reaching consequences for party systems, the composition of legislatures, and the durability of democratic arrangements (Sartori 1994 [1997?]; Lijphart and Waisman 1996). Majoritarian electoral systems, like first past the post, systematically exaggerate the parliamentary lead for the party in first place with the aim of securing a decisive outcome and government accountability, thereby excluding smaller parties from the division of spoils. In contrast, proportional electoral systems lower the hurdles for smaller parties, maximizing their inclusion into the legislature and ultimately into coalition governments. Consociational292theories suggest that proportional electoral systems are most more likely to facilitate accommodation between diverse ethnic groups, making them more suitable for new democracies struggling to achieve legitimacy and stability in plural societies. These are important claims that, if true, have significant consequences for agencies seeking to promote democratic development and peacekeeping. To explore the evidence for these arguments, the first section of this chapter summarizes the key assumptions in consociational theories of democracy and outlines the central propositions examined in this study. The second section describes the data, research design, and methods. Evidence is drawn from the current release of the 1996–8 Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES),3 based upon national election surveys in a dozen nations at different levels of democratic and socio-economic development. The study compares three nations with majoritarian electoral systems—the United States, Britain, and Australia); three using ‘mixed’ or parallel electoral systems—Taiwan, Ukraine, and Lithuania; and six countries with proportional representation (PR) systems—Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Spain, New Zealand, and Israel. The study compares political attitudes and behaviour among a diverse range of ethnic minorities such as the Russian-speaking population living in Ukraine, residents in the Catalan, Galician, and Basque regions in Spain, African-Americans in the United States, the Arab/Muslim populations in Israel, the Scots and Welsh in293Britain, the Hungarian minority in Romania, the mainland Chinese in Taiwan, and the Maoris in New Zealand. The framework contains relatively homogeneous nations such as Poland and Britain as well as plural societies like Israel and Ukraine. Some countries like Australia are long-established democracies, others like Spain consolidated within recent decades, while others like Ukraine remain in the transitional stage, characterized by unstable and fragmented opposition parties, ineffective legislatures, and limited checks on the executive. Th third section defines and analyzes the major ethnic cleavages in each of these societies and tests the central propositions about the effects of electoral systems on differences in minority-majority support. The results in this chapter remain subject to confirmation in a wider range of societies once more countries have been merged entered into the data-set, but the analysis provide preliminary insights suggesting the need for further investigation. The results of the analysis suggests that there is no simple relationship between the type of electoral system and majority-minority differences in political support. In particular, the study finds no evidence for the proposition that PR party-list systems are directly associated with higher levels of support for the political system among ethnic minorities. The conclusion considers broader issues of effective electoral designs and conflict mediation through constitutional engineering, summarizes the key findings in the chapter, and discusses the next steps in the research agendaimplications.294 Theoretical Framework Ever since seminal work by Maurice Duverger (1954/1964) and by Douglas Rae (1971), a rich literature has developed typologies of electoral systems and analyzed their consequences. The most common approach has compared established democracies in the post-war period to identify the impact of electoral institutions upon the political system, such as for the proportionality of votes to seats, levels of party competition, executive stability, the social composition of legislatures, and voter turn-out.4 During the 1990s the research agenda