Since Lijphart published his original consociational institutional model and its requisites in 1968, the topic has not ceased to generate debates in comparative politics, as reflected in voluminous literature that critique, correct, update or expand the model.
The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a specific question: What has been the impact of a protracted perceived national threat on the democratic quality of the Israeli consociational set-up?
The paper takes a structured contingency approach and seeks to show how the ebb and flow of the protracted state of belligerency and changes in the perceived threat –
(a) shaped Jewish Israeli elites` choices in the first three decades of independence, producing a hybrid (Jewish) uninational consociational regime, excluding from power the (Arab-Palestinian) minority.
(b) immobilized and transformed the above regime in the post-1967 era into a left-right competitive structure, opening the prospect for an informal, consociational (left Jewish-Palestinian) regime.
(c) led to a right-wing backlash, political violence, and a deterioration in the quality of Israel`s democracy in the last two decades focused on the exclusion of the Palestinian minority from power.
The paper will conclude with an assessment of the chances for consociational inclusion of the Palestinian minority due to the impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the new regional alliances in the post -Arab Spring environment in the Middle East.