This paper seeks to understand the gendered implications of consociational governance and the ways in which this inhibits effective representation for women in the public sphere of divided societies. Consociational democracy, as first theorised by Arend Lijphart, has become the most influential paradigm in the field of power-sharing institutional design and conflict management. The premise of consociation is that institutional representation is mandated for certain formerly excluded groups, and proportional electoral representation and civil-service appointments on the basis of membership of said groups is guaranteed. It ensures stability and the opportunity for actors to transform previous conflict and exclusion into political discourse by guaranteeing proportional political representation for selected societal cleavages, typically ethno-national or religious.
However, consociation simultaneously inhibits effective political representation for those whose primary political identities do not align with the societal cleavages that consociation seeks to accommodate, specifically the ‘additional’ cleavage of gender. Given the extensive use of the consociation model as a tool of conflict resolution in divided states and the growing body of literature on the disproportionate negative effect of conflict on women, there is a surprising dearth of literature that examines the effect that impact that the institution of consociation has on women’s representation. This paper goes some way to facilitate an understanding of the specific impact that the consociational model has on women’s representation in the politics of the divided state. We argue that because gender is an integral factor in understanding conflict, it should therefore an integral factor in conflict resolution. Consociationalism is a ‘gender-blind’ theory and therefore is an incomplete/inadequate solution to the ‘problem’ of conflict.
