Some relevant details for the American government case:
Popular election of the Senate began in 1913. Before that each state’s Senators were elected by the state legislature. This means factional dominance of the Senate was screened off, and actually determined the state level.
This is because the dominant group analysis at the time the constitution was written was people, state government, and federal government, and the conversation was about how to prevent a single group from gaining control over all of government.
The slave vs free grouping played out at the state level. Continuing the group analysis, state level politics is viewed as having been largely between urban and rural interests. In the South the rural interests—plantation owners—usually won, and in the North, urban industrialists usually did. The canonical example of the legacy of this divide is that state capitols are rarely the largest city in the state. The capitols—and therefore the state capital—are normally a much smaller city.
This brings us down to the local level, which in the US is where most of the competition between traditional divisions like race, religion and ethnicity played out.
I think at least in the American case, I model the key development as the creation of more and different groupings through federalism, rather than a veto mechanism for traditional groups.
On the other hand, separately I have heard the idea that traditional groups were weaker in the US than in Europe because of the disruption caused by the US’ colonial structure and immigration, so I could be mislead by these peculiar circumstances. I would need a much better understanding of the democratization of other European countries and preferably some outside of Europe. Unfortunately the data is pretty sparse there, as these democracies are usually very young and don’t have many cycles of competition to compare.
Some relevant details for the American government case:
Popular election of the Senate began in 1913. Before that each state’s Senators were elected by the state legislature. This means factional dominance of the Senate was screened off, and actually determined the state level.
This is because the dominant group analysis at the time the constitution was written was people, state government, and federal government, and the conversation was about how to prevent a single group from gaining control over all of government.
The slave vs free grouping played out at the state level. Continuing the group analysis, state level politics is viewed as having been largely between urban and rural interests. In the South the rural interests—plantation owners—usually won, and in the North, urban industrialists usually did. The canonical example of the legacy of this divide is that state capitols are rarely the largest city in the state. The capitols—and therefore the state capital—are normally a much smaller city.
This brings us down to the local level, which in the US is where most of the competition between traditional divisions like race, religion and ethnicity played out.
I think at least in the American case, I model the key development as the creation of more and different groupings through federalism, rather than a veto mechanism for traditional groups.
On the other hand, separately I have heard the idea that traditional groups were weaker in the US than in Europe because of the disruption caused by the US’ colonial structure and immigration, so I could be mislead by these peculiar circumstances. I would need a much better understanding of the democratization of other European countries and preferably some outside of Europe. Unfortunately the data is pretty sparse there, as these democracies are usually very young and don’t have many cycles of competition to compare.