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Is Majority Rule as a decision-making process all that good?
The challenges of social decisions involving divergent interests and concerns have been explored for a long time. In this time, it seems that majority rule has gained ready acceptance as the default method to facilitating social choice decisions over the various other social choice options available. Because of this, majority rule has been conflated with democracy and egalitarianism alongside the qualities attributed to both ideas. The paper will argue that the conflation of these majority rule with democracy and egalitarianism is problematic in that it does not logically follow that majority rule is either democratic, and egalitarian. Rather, each of these ideas are distinct. There thus needs to be greater justification for majority rule. To destabilise the position that majority rule holds, the essay will make the argument towards the lottery voting system. It will use it to show that other methods of voting fare better than majority rule in at least some cases and thus should also be seriously considered. Ultimately, the essay explicates that there are more justifications needed for majoritarian rule.
Compromise and Majority Rule: How Their Dynamic Affects Democracy
Compromises in Democracy, 2020
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MAJORITY AND THE LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY
It seems as if the majority principle permeated almost all walks of life within a differentiated society -to such an extent that it appears normal to associate it with the nature of democracy and to speak about democratic societies. Although early Christianity commenced with an acknowledgement of the conscience of an individual, the aim of church unity soon required that individuals sacrifice their autonomy. Was it necessary to assume that God always sided with the majority and do we have to distinguish between individuals as such and individuals as members merged into a whole? The apparent tension derives from the difference between multiplicity and wholeness revealing the role of two modes of explanation: number and space. It was the Roman jurists who asked questions about the grounds of validity of the majority principle by contemplating how the minority should abide by the decisions of the majority and what should happen to dissenters. In extreme cases force determined the issue. This explains why jural validity preferably required unanimity. Eventually the maxim for the minority was more modest: follow the majority by accepting the majority as having a will of its own. Within canon law the majority is treated as if it were the will of all. At the Third Lateran Council (1179) the number of required votes was established to have a two-thirds majority. The canonists were the first to introduce a distinction between the free rights of individuals and the particular rights of corporations. A new fiction now justified equating the major part (major pars) of an assembly of representatives with the whole itself. Within social contract theories the majority played an important role. But in the thought of Rousseau tension emerged between the general will and the will of all individuals. By interchanging the whole-parts relation with the relation of super-and subordination within the state, Rousseau's social contract theory terminated in assigning an absolute and unlimited power to the general will. It is argued that the majority principle is incapable of functioning as a yardstick for justice and truth -neither of which could be established by a majority vote. Assigning an unlimited legal power to the majority leads to a totalitarian and absolutistic view. The limitations of the majority principle are briefly demonstrated with reference to mathematics and biology. In text books of logic this impasse is designated as the majority fallacy. South Africa is currently facing protests with claims bordering on a dictatorship of the majority. The article is concluded with a brief exposition of the "organic" view of Gierke and with a hint towards an alternative view.
Majority judgment vs. majority rule
Social Choice and Welfare, 2019
The validity of majority rule in an election with but two candidates-and so also of Condorcet consistency-is challenged. Axioms based on evaluating candidatesparalleling those of K. O. May characterizing majority rule for two candidates based on comparing candidates-lead to another method, majority judgment, that is unique in agreeing with the majority rule on pairs of "polarized" candidates. It is a practical method that accommodates any number of candidates, avoids both the Condorcet and Arrow paradoxes, and best resists strategic manipulation.
K. May characterized majority rule as a function satisfying anonymity, neutrality, and responsiveness. Recent work criticized his characterization and opened the way to the introduction of properties defined by taking into account an entire set of societies. Following this approach, this paper presents a new axiomatization of majority rule that appeals, besides a variant of May's responsiveness, to new properties I will call bnull societyQ and bsubsets decomposabilityQ. D
The Tyranny of the Majority - Introduction
The Tyranny of the Majority: History, Concepts, and Challenges. New York: Routledge, 2018
This introduction to the concept of majority tyranny outlines five possible dimensions along which "majority" can be classified and three different interpretations of "tyranny.". Since the combination of those allows for hundreds of definitions, a reasonable discussion should rather start with the historical formation of the concept and limit itself to the forms actually treated by anti-majoritarian authors. Although the exact term "the tyranny of the majority" is not found in political literature before the eighteenth century and theoretical doubts about it remain strong, at least so much seems true that the tyranny of those speaking in the name of the majority remains a reality to cope with in the twenty-first century.
Majority rule in the absence of a majority
What is the meaning of "majoritarianism" as a principle of democratic group decision-making in a judgement aggregation problem, when the propositionwise majority view is logically inconsistent? We argue that the majoritarian ideal is best embodied by the principle of supermajority efficiency (SME). SME reflects the idea that smaller supermajorities must yield to larger supermajorities. We show that in a well-demarcated class of judgement spaces, the SME outcome is generically unique. But in most spaces, it is not unique; we must make trade-offs between the different supermajorities. We axiomatically characterize the class of additive majority rules, which specify how such trade-offs are made. This requires, in general, a hyperrealvalued representation.
Consensus, Legitimacy, and Judgement
Deliberative Democrats have been criticised for promoting an overly consensual style of politics. Agonistic democrats argue that this is because they allow justice to displace 'the political' while others make the opposite charge: deliberative democrats pay insufficient attention to justice and the confrontational style of politics which may be necessary to secure social justice. I argue that the deliberative model aims at strengthening democratic legitimacy, not at producing consensus and that it is centrally concerned with stimulating the exercise of citizens' capacity for judgement. The duty of civility should be regarded as a duty to make impartial judgements, not as a duty to seek compromises. Citizens cannot abdicate their deliberative capacities to any democratic procedure, but must, in the final analysis, judge whether to consent to or dissent from the outcomes of any procedure and an impartial assessment may positively require dissent in some circumstances. 1 Schumpeter took a dim view of the deliberative capacities of the average voter, arguing that the average citizen could not be relied upon to make responsible judgments about distant and rather abstract matters of state. 2 Consequently, he thought that the populace should be kept out of politics as much as possible, leaving it to political elites with the appropriate technical know-how. The resulting, minimalist, model of democracy left little room for popular participation, but was, however, presented as efficient and also fair to the extent that all voters had a formally equal chance to influence the outcome of elections. The formal equality of minimalist, vote-aggregating democracy, offers a rather slender basis for the legitimacy of the resulting laws, however.
Consensus Without Veto-Players: Testing Theories of Consensual Democracy
2006
Arend Lijphart's conceptualization of the distinction between consensual and majoritarian democracy has been one of the most important developments in the study of comparative political systems in the last thirty years, and has indeed served as an antidote to the anglocentrism that previously existed in the study of democratic institutions. However, the concept of consensual democracy is problematic from the point of view of social choice theory. Theorists of consensual democracy have emphasized consensus as an alternative to majority rule. This paper argues, however, that many of the countries most often cited as "consensual" are actually amongst the world's purest examples of government by majority rule, having virtually no constitutional checks and balances. Furthermore,the institutions of consensual democracy follow axiomatically from the requirement of political equality. Far from being a new form of democracy, consensual democracy might better be described as "simple democracy".