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How did Arend Lijphart come to be the world's leading theorist of democracy in sharply divided societies? Perhaps because he grew up in one. Holland is cleaved by deep religious and political divisions; it makes democracy work by formally incorporating its divisions into its representative institutions. Growing up there exposed Lijphart to processes that political scientists raised in, for example, the United States—a far more splintered and individualistic polity—rarely encounter. So, absorbing the Dutch experience, Lijphart developed ideas about democracy so resonant that they have been published in English, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, Polish, Turkish, and Portuguese. Or perhaps Lijphart's theories arose out of his university experiences: Berkeley in the sixties, Leiden in the seventies—places that defined the turmoil of those years, ground-zero of student unrest and protest. Lijphart was assistant, then associate …