Donald Horowitz

Duke University | DU · School of Law and Department of Political Science

This chapter discusses consociational and centripetal methods advanced to reduce ethnic conflict in severely divided societies, evaluates the possible motives for adopting them, and then enumerates reasons for the scarcity of adoptions.

I met Walker Connor in 1972 at the Glazer and Moynihan conference on ethnicity held at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Glazer and Moynihan 1975). We thought we would be intimidated by the company at the conference: Talcott Parsons, Daniel Bell, Andy Greeley, Orlando Patterson, Bill Petersen, and Lucian Pye – a good sample of the elders o...

Societies are severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions that make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. Two commonly proposed methods of amelioration are called consociational and centripetal. Three problems derive from these p...

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. Two commonly proposed methods of amelioration are called consociational and centripetal. Three problems derive from these proposa...

Four leading experts on democracy—Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Donald L. Horowitz, and Marc F. Plattner—discuss the relevance of the "transition paradigm" in light of the "Arab Spring" and other developments in the world today.

This paper is a comment on Excessive Ambitions (II) by Jon Elster which can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2207111.

After the fall of its authoritarian regime in 1998, Indonesia pursued an unusual course of democratization. It was insider-dominated and gradualist, and it involved free elections before a lengthy process of constitutional reform. At the end of the process, Indonesia's amended constitution was essentially a new and thoroughly democratic document. B...

This paper traces the influence of The Federalist Papers on five continents. From 1787 to roughly 1850, The Federalist was widely read and highly influential, especially in Europe and Latin America. Federalist justifications for federalism as a solution to the problem of creating a continental republic or to provincial rivalries were widely accepte...

The survival of the Belgian state is an important matter—and not just to Belgium. If, in the physical and administrative heart of Europe, groups that have lived together peacefully for nearly two centuries decide that they must part, what does that say about the prospects for more fragile, more recently constructed democracies? Partition and secess...

The alternative vote (AV) is a preferential electoral system that tends to reward political moderation and compromise. Fraenkel and Grofman (2004, 2006a, 2006b) have repeatedly attempted to show that AV is not conducive to interethnic moderation in severely divided societies. In this response to their latest attempt, I point out that neither politi...

There are two important questions in post-conflict constitution making, and at present neither of them has a definitive or uniformly accepted answer. The first relates to the best configuration of institutions to adopt in order to ameliorate the problem of the intergroup conflict. The second concerns the process most apt to produce the best configu...

This paper forms part of a symposium on Sanford Levinson's Our Undemocratic Constitution. It points out that although almost no large state that is governed democratically is not a federation, there are only about 24 federations in the world and all but four of these antedate the Third Wave of Democratization, which began in 1974. Most new democrac...

Judicial review is a growing institution. Originating in the United States two centuries ago, the power to declare governmental action, whether legislative or executive, unconstitutional has spread around the world in the last half century. A carefully designed and properly limited constitutional court could be of inestimable benefit to the creatio...

The alternative vote (AV) is an electoral system that tends to produce centripetal effects. It therefore has some potential to foster interethnic compromise and coalition in severely divided societies. Fraenkel and Grofman's attempt to show that AV will not “necessarily” and “uniformly” produce moderate results refutes a proposition that has not be...

Constitutions are generally made by people with no previous experience in constitution making. The assistance they receive from outsiders is often less useful than it may appear. The most pertinent foreign experience may reside in distant countries, whose lessons are unknown or inaccessible. Moreover, although constitutions are intended to endure,...

The alternative vote (AV) is a preferential electoral system that tends to reward political moderation and compromise. Fraenkel and Grofman have modeled the likely effects of AV in severely divided societies, in order to impugn AV as a tool of interethnic accommodation. In this response, I show that Fraenkel and Grofman’s model is based on extreme...

Electoral systems do not simply reflect voter preferences, social cleavages, or the political party configuration of a given society. All electoral systems shape and reshape these features. The choice of one electoral system or another involves a decision about what goals decision-makers wish to foster. The present article enumerates six possible g...

If the study of law is inherently comparative, the only question is whether the comparisons are to be implicit and ineffable, as they largely are now, or explicit and subject to serious investigation. There is no option not to compare: there is only the option to pretend not to compare or to compare inarticulately. Of course, some subjects can be c...

Reinterpreting the principle of self-determination, some theorists have proposed that victimized ethnic groups ought to have a right to secede from states in which they are located. Proponents of such a right assert that, by separating antagonistic groups, secession can alleviate ethnic conflict. Secession, however, does not create homogeneous succ...

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Advocates of one or another set of institutions for new democracies have typically neglected the question of adoptability. The omission is especially evident in institutional prescriptions for the reduction of ethnic conflict in severely divided societies. These have been advanced with little regard for obstacles likely to be encountered in the pro...

This book, comprising papers contributed to a conference entitled Constitutional Design 2000 and held at the University of Notre Dame in December 1999, brings together the views of the leading academic specialists on the theory of effective democratization, and of the institutional design tasks involved.

Written by a leading group of scholars in the field, this unique volume examines post‐Agreement Northern Ireland from a comparative perspective. It shatters the myth that Northern Ireland is ‘a place apart’ – its conflict the result of peculiarly local circumstances. The book is divided into two sections. The first includes theoretical chapters tha...

National Self‐determination and Secession brings together a number of original essays by leading figures in the field on the ethics of secession. It examines such questions as: When is secession justified? What is a people and what gives them a right to secede? Is national self‐determination compatible with liberal and democratic principles? It off...

Part 1 of this article published at 42 Am. J. Comp. L. 233 (1994) is linked below. In Part 2 here, the author shows the powerful influence of common law methods on legal reasoning, on the reshaping of old Islamic law doctrines and the creation of wholly new obligations, and on the legal process in general. He then reevaluates the predominant approa...

Part 1 of this article published at 42 Am. J. Comp. L. 233 (1994) is linked below. In Part 2 here, the author shows the powerful influence of common law methods on legal reasoning, on the reshaping of old Islamic law doctrines and the creation of wholly new obligations, and on the legal process in general. He then reevaluates the predominant approa...

Abstract not available

International migration is often considered a relatively new development in world history. Yet, while there has been a surge in migration since World War II, the worldwide movement of peoples is a longstanding phenomenon. So, too, are the fundamental issues raised by immigration. How do immigrants fit into and affect the polity and society of the c...

The introduction to this special issue asks what is distinctive about public policy making in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In field after field, some political scientists have argued for distinguishing Western polities from developing polities, whereas other have argued for inclusive treatment. The essay assesses these divergent perspectives as...

Considering public policy as both a dependent and an independent variable, this article undertakes a systematic assessment of the sources and systemic consequences of policy. It begins with a statement of contrasting theories of the sources of policy. One strand of comparative theory emphasizes national cultures and elite beliefs as the main source...

Europe and America : a Comparative Analysis of Ethnicity. Donald L. HOROWITZ Societies and polities differ in the extent to which they divide ethnic groups into natives and immigrants. In some states, indigenousness creates strong claims to priority, whereas in others yesterday's immigrants can become today's natives. In the United States, despite...

Abstract not available

In the last fifteen years or so, courts have issued a small but significant number of decrees requiring that governmental bodies reorganize themselves so that their behavior will comport with certain legal standards. Such decrees, addressed to school systems, prison and mental hospital officials, welfare administrators, and public housing authoriti...

Recently the Academy and two British organizations, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Policy Studies Institute, sponsored a study comparing and evaluating United States and British efforts to eliminate discrimination and increase opportunities for racial minorities. This study was funded by the Commission for Racial Equality, the German Ma...

Among the problems caused by the introduction of institutional reform and social policy cases into the judicial system is the unsatisfactory use of expert testimony, by which committed social scientists have persuaded the courts to adopt dubious behavioral propositions in areas including competency-based education; the mainstreaming of handicapped,...

In the analysis of ethnic separatism and secession, two approaches can be distinguished. One is to ask what forces are responsbile for the general upsurge in secessionist movements, from Burma te-Biafra and Bangladesh, from Corsica to Quebec, and from Eritrea to the Southern Philippines. Another approach is to ask what moves certain territorially d...

There is a new emphasis on change emerging in writings on ethnicity. Some of the most important changes involve group boundaries and conflict relationships. Ethnic groups often assimilate with other groups or differentiate themselves from groups of which they were formerly a part. As changes of this kind occur, cultural movements com monly emerge t...

The growing recognition of the importance of ethnic, racial, and religious groups in the politics of the new states has given rise to an urgent need for theory. Although this need extends to all aspects of group relations, the first priority is for systematic classification to reduce the bewildering array of descent-groups in the developing world t...

Judicial review is a growing institution. Originating in the United States two centuries ago, the power to declare governmental action, whether legislative or executive, unconstitutional has spread around the world in the last half century. A carefully designed and properly limited constitutional court could be of inestimable benefit to the creatio...

Abstract There is a long-standing difference of approach between those who see ethnic groups as firmly bounded, durable communities inclined toward ethnocentrism, hostility to outsiders, and passionate conflict, and those who see them as social constructs, with a solidarity based on material rewards and conflict behavior based on calculation. This...