Donald L. Horowitz (born 1939) is James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science Emeritus at Duke Law School and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, United States.
With law degrees from Syracuse and Harvard Universities, Donald Horowitz earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard. Most of his work has concerned ethnic conflict and accommodation in severely divided societies, based on a combination of extensive field research and wide knowledge of the phenomena in multiple countries, beginning with a long series of stays in Malaysia immediately after his Ph.D. studies. He has also published widely on legal and constitutional processes.
Horowitz is the author of Coup Theories and Officers’ Motives: Sri Lanka in Comparative Perspective (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Ethnic Groups in Conflict (University of California Press, 1985, 2000),[1] A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (California, 1991), which won the Ralph Bunche Prize of the American Political Science Association; The Deadly Ethnic Riot (California, 2001); and Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2013), a study of that country’s process of democratization and extensive constitutional reform, which was issued in a Bahasa Indonesia translation in 2014.
Writing about Ethnic Groups in Conflict, Ashutosh Varshney states that it “was a seminal text. For the first time in scholarly history, a book on ethnic conflict covered a whole variety of topics, ranging from concepts and definitions to those spheres of institutional politics (party politics, military politics, affirmative action) in which the power of ethnicity had become obvious and could no longer be ignored.”[2] The book’s analyses have been influential on many aspects of ethnic politics, from its use of social identity theory to explain certain parts of conflict behavior, to its careful discussion of “coup proofing” by civilian leaders of ethnically divided polities, to its analysis of ethnically-based political parties and coalitions. The sections on coalitions informed Horowitz’s discussion of interethnic vote pooling and moderation, and his critique of consociationalism.
Before his appointment at Duke, Horowitz had appointments at the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Brookings Institution. He also served as a law clerk to a federal judge and as an appellate lawyer representing the US government. His two books on the legal process, The Jurocracy: Government Lawyers, Agency Programs, and Judicial Decisions (D.C. Heath, 1977) and The Courts and Social Policy (Brookings, 1977), reflect his interest in legal decision making and in bringing social science to bear in studying it. The latter book won the Louis Brownlow Award of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Horowitz’s most recent books expand on several themes of his previous work. Constitutional Processes and Democratic Commitment (Yale University Press, 2021) makes an argument for constitution making through deliberation designed to produce consensus decisions, an argument he supports with evidence of the superior quality of deliberation found in consensus processes for constitution making and for other processes. Of this book, Jon Elster said on the back jacket that it proposed “a compelling framework for the study of constitutional processes more generally.” The author, he added, “shows himself to be informed as well as wise. If constitution-makers are equally wise, they can benefit greatly from this book.” Another book that deals with both politics and law concerns Federalism, Regional Autonomy, and Ethnic Conflict: Politics and Law. Currently in press, it focuses on the potential benefits of regional devolution for ethnic accommodation, the fear of secession that in many countries inhibits the realization of these benefits, and the conflicts that often occur within devolved units, reducing the benefits of devolution at those levels.
Horowitz has acted as a consultant on institutions to reduce ethnic conflict in several countries. His advocacy of centripetal methods of coping with conflict through electoral and other institutions to foster political moderation has won support from quite a few scholars and in the practice of some politicians in plural societies. Nevertheless, consociation remains the more widely adopted method of formal interethnic power sharing and the one with more scholarly adherents. Horowitz is working on a book-length study of the problems of ethnic power sharing and constitutional design for severely divided societies.