New Patterns of Democracy in the Countries of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems

The chapter introduces a new database on political-institutional patterns of democracy used in the contributions to the book. It provides an update and extension of Lijphart’s (1999, 2012) measurement of consensus and majoritarian democracy for the countries of the second wave of the CSES during the period 1997–2006, using 11 partly improved indicators. The chapter explores patterns of democracy by the means of factor analysis, construct additive indices, and present the resulting country scores of consensus and majoritarian democracy graphically. Two variants are presented, one featuring Lijphart’s (1999) classic ‘executives–parties’ and ‘federal–unitary’ dimensions, and another incorporating direct democracy into the framework, yielding an additional ‘cabinets–direct democracy’ dimension