3.2 Patterns of democracy with Prof Lijphart

Welcome to episode 2 of Season 3 of Real Democracy Now! a podcast. Season 3 is looking at elections, electoral systems, electoral reform and alternatives.

 

In today’s episode, I’m talking with Professor Arend Lijphart about his work identifying two main categories of democracies which relate in part to their electoral systems. 

 

Arend is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California. His field of specialisation is comparative politics. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, with the two editions of his Patterns of Democracy from 1984 and 2012 being perhaps his most well-known and the subject of our conversation today. 

 

I spoke with Professor Lijphart about 

 

How he came to devote his life to the detailed empirical analysis of democracy in multiple countries around the world [1.10]

 

The relationship between his empirical work and his theory around patterns of democracy [5.30]

 

The variables he uses to demonstrate that consensual democracies outperform majoritarian democracies [18:35 ]

 

Criticisms that his approach does not apply to developing non-Western democracies [28.10]

 

In the next episode I’ll be talking to Professor John Gastil, a Professor in the Department of Communication Arts & Sciences at Penn State College of Liberal Arts, about a workshop he recently co-hosted with Erik Olin Wright, a Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, titled Legislature by Lot [32.37]

 

I hope you’ll join me then.