Summary
Sammy Smooha’s category, as Dowty presents it, for states that combine a dominant ethnic character with democratic rights for all: “a system that combines a genuine democracy for all with institutionalized dominance for one of its constituent groups” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
Details
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Smooha posits ethnic democracy as a third democratic alternative for deeply divided societies, alongside majoritarianism and Consociationalism, defining it as “the extension of political and civil rights to individuals and certain collective rights to minorities with institutionalized dominance over the state by one of the ethnic groups” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
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Yoav Peled developed the idea, for Israel, as a confluence of two types of citizenship: “republican” citizenship with communal dimensions for Jews, and “liberal” citizenship with civil and political rights, but no share of communality, for Arabs (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
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Dowty argues ethnic democracy is not a third type on the majoritarian-consociational axis, since that axis measures how far power is diffused (coalition size, checks and balances, electoral system, federalism, entrenchment), features by which ethnic democracies can themselves be measured; the concept instead addresses the relationship of nations to states, and comes close to the classic definition of a nation-state (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
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Dowty’s comparison group: of some seventy-one states in 1995 with a dominant ethnic group (by language) over 50 and under 95 percent, twenty-six were ranked “free” by Freedom House in 1994-1995; addressing only ethnic divisions, eleven of the twenty-six met at least three of Arend Lijphart’s four power-sharing conditions, and Table 7 lists Israel among those without ethnic power-sharing, with a dominant group of 81 percent and a linguistic minority of 19 percent (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4326-4422).
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Dowty frames the underlying problem generally: all nationalisms have a potential problem with minority rights, as Jewish history demonstrates very well, and a hostile majority can suppress a minority by democratic as well as nondemocratic means; the critical question is how far ethnonational identity is intertwined with the very definition of the state (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4261-4325).
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Dowty’s Chapter 9 discussion of Table 7 completes the comparison: of seventy-one states in 1995 with a dominant linguistic group between 50 and 95 percent, twenty-six were Freedom House “free”, and eleven of the twenty-six meet at least three of Lijphart’s four power-sharing conditions; the eleven power-sharing states’ dominant groups averaged 67 percent against 79 percent in the fifteen without, only Finland among states with minorities under 20 percent used ethnic power-sharing, and Israel’s roughly 19 percent Arab minority stands near the threshold — while among the twenty-six, only the Baltic states parallel Israel in having sizable minorities linked to a potentially hostile neighbor (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 4423-4620).
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Dowty’s Epilogue gives the concept its closing form: the Supreme Court’s minimal definition of the state’s Jewishness in the Ben Shalom Case — maintenance of a Jewish majority, the Law of Return, ties with Jewish communities outside Israel — is, he argues, inherently consistent with liberal democracy and unique in none of its features, there being at least two dozen ethnic democracies in the world; Israel can be both Jewish and democratic with continuing tension between the two ideals, but “there is no precedent for a stable ethnic democracy with a minority of 40 percent or more”, as an Israel extended over the whole of Mandatory Palestine would have (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 5701-5800).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Sammy Smooha, Consociationalism, Arend Lijphart