Word Count – In his book, Patterns of Democracy, Arend Lijphart seeks to evaluate whether his distinction between majoritarian and consensual democracy, as presented in his book, Democracy in Plural Society, remains valid. Furthermore, Lijphart would like to examine its impact on the regime's performance. While not all of Lijphart's measurements are equally convincing on this point, the tables and diagrams in his book provide a reasonable and acceptable picture of how each country fits into an overall pattern of democratic stability. politics. This approach is decidedly ambitious: it examines more countries than its previous effort. Lijphart suggests Britain as the conventional majoritarian democracy – it was majoritarian according to Lijhart's ten indicators from 1945 to 1996. Lijphart presents Switzerland, Belgium and even the European Union as examples of consensual democracy. Consensus democracy, according to Lijphart, has “kinder and gentler” features – a topic to which this review will return. In summary, Lijphart recommends “consensual democracy” as the ideal type of government for any state – not just one with “deep ethnic, linguistic, religious or ideological fractures.” Lijphart's speech on federalism is particularly interesting. He favors the “secondary characteristics” of this type of regime – such as the prohibition for the national majority to shift power from federal units to the central government. This accords with his vision of “congruent federalism,” that is, countries where federal lines are not drawn with ethnic groups in mind (such as the United States) and “incongruent federalism,” which can have an ethnic overtone, religious or linguistic. homogeneity (as in Switzerland and India)....... half of the document... lends itself to majoritarians and other skeptics. Boivin: Lijphart argues that some of the key indicators of majoritarian systems are first-past-the-post-electoral mechanisms that exaggerate a party's political representations: single-party cabinets, strong executives, unicameral legislatures, unitary government structures, a competitive pluralism of interest groups and central banks controlled by the executive. Boivin: The flaw is rooted in the fact that Lijphart conflates the ideals of majoritarian democracy with the Western model, the majoritarian system of Great Britain. In other words, it is not always clear whether Lijphart modes are inferred as ideal types or drawn from actual cases. A better approach would have been to stick much more closely to the purely deductive method with which it begins, in order to construct truly ideal types with which to compare real-life cases..