In research spanning several decades, Arend Lijphart has analysed ‘consociational’ democracy and ‘patterns’ of democracy. Drawing on his enormous effort, we have proposed a theory of ‘power diffusion’ and a new empirical and methodological variation. In this contribution, we review the concept in the light of the recent literature and recalculate measures of ‘power diffusion’ relying on an updated database between 1990 and 2022, with a special focus on the potential convergence of models of democracy.