The paper offers a broad and systematic analysis of the comparative trajectory of international democratic change. It tries to achieve this using a twofold approach. First, it challenges dominant caricatures and examines, in two brief case studies, the degree to which Switzerland and the UK remain extreme examples of consensus and majoritarian forms of democracy. To this end, the paper updates Arend Lijphart’s seminal research on democratic forms and then re-positions both countries on a conceptual map of democracy for the period 1997-2007. In a second step, heteroscedastic multilevel models and a much broader data base are used, which allows modelling the variance of types of democracy over time, revealing information about the determinants of convergence. A series of hypotheses on the roots of convergence on an executives-parties dimension of democracy is tested. In sum, the findings indicate that while there has been a trend away from extreme types of democracy in single cases, no general trend of convergence can be observed over time, but substantial explanations such as pressure from globalization (to some degree mediated by the domestic institutionalized veto structure) still influence convergence.
