Is Depillarisation of Consociations Possible? Segmental Representation, Second Policy Dimension and Issue Seepage

The initial enthusiasm of consociations’ success was grounded in Lijphart’s description of successful elite cooperation in divided yet stable Low Countries (among others): here political elites representing cohesive societal pillars led their followers by example ensuring pragmatic intergroup cooperation to attain shared interest: political stability, societal welfare, mutual respect and recognition (though the latter remained conditional). On this view, elites were making significant decisions away from the public eye, without the need to justify these to their voters (Lijphart 1969; Lijphart 1977: 114-119). Since, Lijphart‘s (1969, 216) "cartel of elites" and most recently Bochsler’s "democratic oligopoly" (2017), representation in consociations has been pegged to "patterns of accommodation" and institutional performance at the elite level. Substantive representation of groups and their members’ interests takes the backseat. My paper turns to an underexplored effect of consociational solutions that have been laid bare by the changing societal dynamics in divided places: Which conditions facilitate identities deemed politically relevant at the inception of consociational system to lose their original significance? This paper thus starts by focussing on the "vital interests" of politically significant groups in consociational regimes to identify issues on which cross-ethnic collaboration was feasible. Second, it identifies sets of policy dimensions that politically significant communities could thus jointly engage with and jointly reform successfully gradually changing the parameters of societal building blocks that ought to be represented. Third part of the paper zooms on those less successful initiatives for reform, where representatives have thus acted to the detriment of inclusive political process, hindering depillarisation and diminishing trust of citizens that formal institutions of the state can deliver on their original promise of intergroup equity. Mapping the moments of institutional (non) change in several case studies, the paper identifies societal challenges with the potential to contribute to depillarisation of powersharing places and contribute to evolution of more representative political process.