216 WORLD POLITICS as possible.In consociational democracies,politics is treated not as a game but as a serious business. FACTORS CONDUCIVE TO CONSOCIATIONAL DEMOCRACY Consociational democracy means government by elite cartel designed to turn a democracy with a fragmented political culture into a stable democracy.Efforts at consociationalism are not necessarily successful, of course:consociational designs failed in Cyprus and Nigeria,and Uruguay abandoned its Swiss-style consociational system.Successful consociational democracy requires:(I)That the elites have the ability to accommodate the divergent interests and demands of the subcul- tures.(2)This requires that they have the ability to transcend cleav- ages and to join in a common effort with the elites of rival subcultures. (3)This in turn depends on their commitment to the maintenance of the system and to the improvement of its cohesion and stability.(4) Finally,all of the above requirements are based on the assumption that the elites understand the perils of political fragmentation.These four requirements are logically implied by the concept of consocia- tional democracy as defined in this paper.Under what conditions are they likely to be fulfilled?An examination of the successful consocia- tional democracies in the Low Countries,Switzerland,Austria,and Lebanon suggests a number of conditions favorable to the establish- ment and the persistence of this type of democracy.These have to do with inter-subcultural relations at the elite level,inter-subcultural rela- tions at the mass level,and elite-mass relations within each of the subcultures. RELATIONS AMONG THE ELITES OF THE SUBCULTURES It is easier to assess the probability of continued success of an already established consociational democracy than to predict the chance of success that a fragmented system would have if it were to attempt consociationalism.In an existing consociational democracy,an investi- gation of the institutional arrangements and the operational code of inter-elite accommodation can throw light on the question of how thorough a commitment to cooperation they represent and how effec- tive they have been in solving the problems caused by fragmentation. The length of time a consociational democracy has been in operation is also a factor of importance.As inter-elite cooperation becomes habit- ual and does not represent a deliberate departure from competitive responses to political challenges,consociational norms become more