Can policymakers improve democratic stability in multiethnic countries through constitutional design? There are two competing answers, consensus and integrative democracy, where conventional wisdom favors the former. How stable a democratic regime is will however not only depend on the ethnic diversity of a country, but also the absence or presence of crises. In the absence of a crisis, the benefits of democratic stability render constitutional design irrelevant for the survival of multiethnic democracies, but during times of crisis, integrative democracies are more stable. This is for two reasons: consensus regime are more likely to experience deadlock that makes the national government ineffective, and ethnic groups can mobilize for collective extra-systemic action more easily since they already are organized political actors.
