I have selected the UK as it is both the "original and best-known example" (Lijphart, 1999, p.9) of the majoritarian model, while the Netherlands is a strong consensus democracy and is easily comparable to the UK as both countries are European and parliamentary countries. While I realise that the comparison between these two countries is insufficient to make conclusive claims about consensus and majoritarian systems as a whole, it does allow us to see how both systems perform in practice and therefore any results found could be used to make general observations about their democratic performance. In this essay I assess both countries against each of the four indicators and conclude that consensus democracies perform better as they are more representative, supported by the fact that the Netherlands performs better than the UK on all the indicators. Democracy is best defined as "government by and for the people" (Lijphart, 1999, p.1), so representation is the key as the government that best represents its people is likely to be the most democratic.
Literature Review.
This essay contributes to research on the quality of democracy, in particular on the democratic performance of consensus systems compared to majoritarian systems. Its focus is on comparing the democratic performance of the Netherlands and the UK, the results of which are used to make general claims about the democratic performances of the democratic systems that they have adopted. This field was effectively established by Lijphart (1999), in which he gave ten distinctions betweeen majoritarian and consensus democracies and tried to assess them both against his proposed criterion. He suggests that the quality of democracy is determined by how well a given political system performs against democratic measures such as women's representation, political equality, electoral participation, satisfaction with democracy, government-voter proximity, accountability and corruption and popular cabinet support.
