Consociational Mechanisms in Anocracies as a Resource to Manage Ethnic Cleavages in a Society

Consociational theory since its formulation in the late 1960-s by Arendt Lijphart has made a significant contribution to the understanding of democratic societies which are divided by a cross-cutting ethnic, religious, class and other cleavages but can maintain their stability. Existing explanations of political stability in highly divided societies are only related to the analysis of democratic political regimes. I argue that anocracies also face the problem of ethnic cleavages’ politicization and use consociational practices to level its negative consequences. The aim of this study is to analyze consociational mechanisms in anocratic regimes with strong ethnic cleavages. Total sample consists of 62 anocratic political regimes. Hypothesis of the study is that the consociational mechanisms contribute to the political stability in anocracies. Using regression model with fixed effects and case-study of typical cases, I have found that consociational mechanism of “grand coalition” and partly “autonomy of segments” do contribute to the political stability of these regimes. Moreover, the mechanism of “proportionality” does not work in anocracies, as far as they use other strategies of ethnic minorities’ representation: ethnic quotas and special cutting of electoral constituencies (like in Malaysia). There is also no connection between the type of anocracy (open or closed) and political stability, but it was found that anocracies with great economic growth are more politically stable.