On building consociational nations: the cases of the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Of late, the term "consociational" has been increasingly used to characterize a certain pattern of political life in which the political elites of distinct social groups succeed in establishing a viable, pluralistic State by a process of mutual forbearance and accommodation. In modern social science, the word was first used by David Apter. The term was further elaborated into a general classificatory concept by Arend Lijphart. Independently of him and sometimes under different terms like Proporzdemokratie or Konkordanzdemokratie, Gerhard Lehmbruch, Jürg Steiner, and Rodney Stiefbold have sought to analyze comparable types of political experience. The word "consociatio" originated with Johannes Althusius. It is significant that a term first adopted to analyze the development of a new polity in the Low Countries in the early seventeenth century, is now being revived in the study of comparative political development in the twentieth century. A process of building-up a new political society from below, to some degree by the consent of participating communities, in which deliberate compromises by elites carefully circumscribe and limit the extent to which political power can be wielded by one political center, may be a relatively rare political phenomenon.