Okay. You're right. The whole framework comes from Arend Lijphart's work, Patterns of Democracy. There are two main types. He breaks down types of democracy in the advanced industrialized world into two families: the majoritarian and the consensus democracies.
Majoritarian democracies are characterized by institutions. The electoral and the party systems are among those institutions that produce, generate, and favour a political majority. They create efficient, stable, strong governments, which can produce public policies that respond to whatever the perceived needs of the situation in society can be.
Consensus democracies are fundamentally based on a different footing and assumption. Consensus democracies work and are based on institutional pillars that create consensus among different linguistic, ethnic, religious, or whatever groups in society make up the political community. Not surprisingly, the institutions of consensus democracy are typically adopted by diverse, multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multilingual political communities.
If you inject a majoritarian electoral system into such a body politic, you are either going to favour one particular political interest by excluding others—the kinds of distortions we talked about that you want to avoid—or you need to make sure you have other institutions in place that will balance the minority-harming tendencies of the first past the post electoral system. One such institution could be federally created.