Debating Consociational Politics:
Normative and Explanatory Arguments
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Brendan O’Leary
Lauder Professor of Political Science
Director of the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict
University of Pennsylvania
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Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association
Philadelphia, August 27-30, 2003
© Copyright 2003 Brendan O’Leary
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Acknowledgements. The USIP provided support to the author and John McGarry for the research behind this manuscript.
The Rockefeller Foundation provided the author a residential fellowship at Bellagio in the winter of 2002, and the ECMI
provided him a residency at Flensburg in the summer of 2003. A first and longer version of this paper was presented at the
University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario in November 2002, and in a revised form at the Cultural Diversity in a
Globalizing World conference in Hawaii in February 2003. This paper consists of segments of a work in progress.
Appreciation is owed to John McGarry, Arend Lijphart, Katharine Adeney, John H. Aldrich, Tozun Bachelli, Florian
Beiber, Matthias Bogaards, Shelley Deane, Kristin Henrard, John A. Hall, Jim Hughes, Margaret Moore, Jack H. Nagel,
Sid Noel, Jurg Steiner, Gwen Sasse, Mark Weller, Steve Wilkinson, and Stefan Wolff, and all my colleagues at the Asch
Center. These arguments were compelled into existence by the conviction that it is important to rebut now conventionalized
criticisms of consociational theory and practice, for which some of my friends and teachers are responsible, e.g. Brian
Barry, Ian S. Lustick, and Donald L. Horowitz. Changing their minds is part of its agenda.
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