Constitutional Design, Crises, and Regime Stability in Multiethnic Democracies

Can policymakers improve democratic stability in multiethnic countries through constitutional design? There are two competing answers, consensus and integrative democracy, where conventional wisdom favors the former. How stable a democratic regime is will however not only depend on the ethnic diversity of a country, but also the absence or presence of crises. In the absence of a crisis, the benefits of democratic stability render constitutional design irrelevant for the survival of multiethnic democracies, but during times of crisis, integrative democracies are more stable. This is for two reasons: consensus regime are more likely to experience deadlock that makes the national government ineffective, and ethnic groups can mobilize for collective extra-systemic action more easily since they already are organized political actors.