Democracy mostly comes down to majority rule. If a majority of the population favors a policy it will take effect, and if a majority oppose it it will not. In modern democracies this is usually done with institutions as intermediaries: one or more elected legislatures, maybe a separately-elected president, sometimes officials like judges appointed by a legislative majority, etc. Of course the views of these institutions may not precisely match those of the people who elected them, but in practice you get ideological majorities that are a rough match for important ideological blocs in the population.
This scares people. Everyone wants to make sure that a majority of the population won’t suddenly make their life miserable, the so-called “tyranny of the majority”. But what does that really mean? And how can we design a constitution to alleviate these concerns? That’s what I want to explore in this series. This first part will be about interaction between the majority and minority.
‘Democracy Bad’
I feel like people often use tyranny of the majority as euphemism for disliking democracy. Like, yes, if most people in a society want some bad public policy, then under a democracy that will usually happen and it will be bad. But like, that’s just what democracy is. Unless you have a principled reason to believe a majority of people shouldn’t make the rules regarding a certain topic, and a mechanism for preventing that, you kind of haven’t said anything.
I think there are stronger variants of the tyranny of the majority argument, though.
Distributing Resources Poorly
One version of tyranny of the majority stems from resource distribution. The theory here is that in a democracy where you just need 51% to govern, the optimal strategy is for 51% of the population to band together and use the government to shift the distribution of resources toward themselves and away from the the other 49%. This doesn’t have to be literal economic resources, it can be any zero-sum thing like the right to harass the other group. And of course in practice it’s not 51/49.
Where this occurs harmfully depends on your political and ethical beliefs. The left-wing version of this argument says that the dominant majority group will make laws that benefit themselves. The utilitarian harm here is that the majority benefit less from hogging these resources than the minority suffer from lacking them. The more deontological/virtue ethical harm has to do with valuing equality in and of itself.
The right-wing version of this argument says that the subordinate majority group will make laws that benefit themselves. The utilitarian harm is that this dampens the incentive structures that cause people to work hard and create economic growth. The more deontological/virtue ethical harm is that the dominant group deserves the resources due to merit or private property or whatever.1
Is this real?
While this phenomenon can be real, I think it’s greatly exaggerated. This argument treats democracy as a single battle: majority group vs. minority group. In reality, however, a country is made up of many different divisions and minority groups, and the way they form coalitions puts simplistic models to shame.
Let’s take present-day US, for example. You have substantial minority black and Hispanic populations. You have a protestant plurality with large catholic and unaffiliated populations. You have a large college educated population. You have wide income, age and geographical spectrums. You have LGBT people, and immigrants, and Native Americans. Any winning coalition is going to be an alliance between members of many different groups.
But OK, the US is unusually diverse. Most countries have a fairly homogenous majority of poor/non-college-educated/lower-class (for simplicity I’ll use class) majority-race/religion/ethnicity (for simplicity I’ll use race) people, with small racial and upper-class minorities. Even there, diversity in geography and age is fairly universal. But still, even assuming a country is really homogenous except for small minorities, there are factors that make the typical story unrealistic or at least more complex.
First, the left-wing and right-wing versions of this tale actually cut against each other. Because views on racial equality and class equality tend to be correlated on the individual level and among elites, the majority population is caught between their racial solidarity on the right and the class solidarity on the left.2
Second, the argument is just an oversimplification: people don’t homogenously vote for the party that matches their individual demographics, and politicians don’t adopt policy that just benefits their coalition. Look at exit polls from any election, it is rare to find any group that votes >90% for one party. Then the politicians they elect usually have ideological motivations that cause them not to just privilege people who voted for them.
I do think you see this phenomenon in places that are especially divided on one racial/ethnic/geographical line, with a large minority population (eg: US pre-civil war, India pre-partition, Austria-Hungary), at least the left-wing version3. I also think that there’s not much you can do about it there. Mechanisms that attempt to give the sides equal influence or that require legislation to be approved by a majority on both sides usually lead to rising tensions and eventual unravelling (see the Senate in the years leading up to the Civil War). I can’t think of a single instance of a very divided country that has been successful at producing harmony, so IDK if it’s possible or what constitution would facilitate that.
A Say for the Minority
Another version of tyranny of the majority is the idea that the minority should get a say. But what does a “say” mean? In general I don’t want the minority to be able to block the passage of new laws, more on this later. So what does a say literally mean?
Maybe it means that the minority should be able to give input, to speak about politics. I agree that this is important. I think some version of freedom of speech for the public is necessary, and I talk about this more in my next series, On Constitutions. I also think it’s good practice to allow the minority in the legislature to comment on proposed legislation. I don’t have much to say about the optimal way of doing this; minimum reading and debate times seem pretty good, although you want some mechanism to be able to skip these for emergency legislation (likely supermajority requirement).
I think there’s one important practice, however, that’s more substantive than just input. The minority party or coalition in the legislature (let’s call it party for simplicity) should be able to propose legislation. Many laws are supported by a majority of the legislature made up of the minority party and some moderates from the majority party, and I don’t want the leader of the majority to be able to block such legislation from ever coming to the floor. This blockage is common practice in the US; in the House it’s even encouraged by the “majority of the majority” practice. Of course in presidential democracies if the president is from the majority party they can veto this legislation, but if there are enough defectors from the minority they can override this, and sometimes the president will side with the moderates. 4
In most countries with this practice, it’s implemented through a nonpartisan official like the UK House Speaker who is responsible for bringing legislation to a vote and who is encouraged to bring minority party legislation. This practice works well enough, but I think even better could be to have all legislation brought to the floor by petition. This is an existing but rare practice found in the U.S. House called the discharge petition, and I think it could become the sole method for bringing legislation to the floor. Only after a majority of the legislature signs off on legislation does it make its way to a floor vote. Of course you still have the issue of scheduling the votes, as well as amendments, which will have to be handled through other procedure and tradition including potentially a nonpartisan speaker. As a mechanism for ensuring that the minority party can bring legislation to the vote if it has a chance of passing, however, petition seems like it would work well.
So those are the arguments for tyranny of the majority to do with dealing with the minority. In the other post in this series, I’ll deal with majorities that we don’t think of as solid enough to govern unrestrictedly, and mechanisms to prevent them from doing so.
Doesn’t it seem convenient that in both cases the non-utilitarian harm corresponds nicely to an IMO less arbitrary utilitarian harm? Maybe there’s a lesson here for ethics…
Or at least, this is what used to happen and continues to happen in poorer places. In richer/more developed countries, this is shifting, and you are seeing the left’s coalition become that of minority-race and college-educated people, while the right is taking the majority-race non-college-educated population. This breaks the simplistic model even more.
Why don’t you see the right-wing version of this argument in similar places where the lower class is the one with the majority? Because in places like these - Apartheid South Africa, modern-day Israel, maybe Jim Crow south (not sure if whites were a majority there) - the dominant minority is so afraid of this phenomenon that they take away the voting rights of the majority.
This is also a reason to prefer parliamentary democracy over presidential democracy, which I hope to talk more about in a future piece.