Drawing on the work of Arend Lijphart, this book focuses on consensus democracies. These democracies entail a complex set of democratic institutional and conventional arrangements and can be regarded as a product of path-dependent development towards a national culture of compromise and bargaining.

Taking a multi-dimensional and multi-spatial approach, this book examines the West central European consensus democracies of Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Switzerland, over the past 40 years. Magone examines how these democracies have been transformed by Europeanization...