2018. Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft | Comparative Governance and Politics. PDF
Nenad Stojanović
Abstract
Polities that follow the consociational model of democracy adopt powersharing
provisions, guaranteeing a certain number of seats to representatives of
their societies’ main ethnic groups. Yet in all hardcore (“corporate”) consociational
systems—Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Burundi, Lebanon, Northern Ireland,
and South Tyrol—we also find “Others”: citizens who do not belong to any of the
main ethnic segments. These Others are typically subjected to patterns of political
marginalisation and exclusion that are problematic for a liberal democracy. In some
cases, such patterns have been deemed discriminatory by courts, most notably in
several rulings of the European Court of Human Rights concerning the position of
Others in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This article provides a conceptual framework for
identifying Others in consociational systems and presents the first comprehensive
overview of the legal and political status of Others in the six corporate consociations.