Is Rule by Majorities Special?

Abstract

One way of making decisions is for political associates or their representatives to vote on each issue separately in accordance with the majority principle and then take the cumulative outcomes of such majority decision making to define the collective choice for public policy. We call such a system one of majorities rule. Thought of in spatial terms, majorities rule is equivalent to the principle of making decisions according to the issue‐by‐issue median of voter preferences. If popular control and political equality are core democratic values, they can be rendered as requirements on a collective choice rule, involving resoluteness, anonymity, strategy‐proofness and responsiveness. These requirements entail that the collective decision rule be a percentile method. If we then add a requirement of impartiality, as exhibited in a collective choice rule which would be chosen behind a veil of ignorance, then the issue‐by‐issue median is uniquely identified as a fair rule. Hence, majorities rule is special. Some objections to this line of reasoning are considered.

Reconciling Representation and Accountability: Three Visions of Democracy Compared

“…I hope that the conceptual framework developed here can be useful in formulating new or refined hypotheses for empirical research. As to equality, for instance, we lack solid empirical knowledge about whether real-world minority cabinets with issue-specific support have the kind of normative advantages highlighted by Ward and Weale (2010). As to accountability, I do not know of any studies on the consequences of issue-specific decisionmaking for performance voting of (sophisticated and unsophisticated) voters.…”

“…These veto rights may be seen as a violation of the egalitarian baseline -as an informal departure from majority rule (Ganghof 2015b). In this spirit, Ward and Weale (2010) suggest that the value of equality demands that informal minority vetoes should be avoided by separating issues as much as possible. Separable issues should be decided by separate majority votes in the legislature, so that no party becomes a veto player on all issues.…”

“…The oppositional support parties are not necessarily veto players in this case, and it is even possible that all or some cabinet parties are outvoted on some issues (Damgaard and Svensson 1989). The underlying ideal has been described as one in which the position of the median party is implemented on each separable dimension (Ward and Weale 2010;Weale 2013). Denmark has probably come closest to this vision of democracy (Christiansen and Damgaard 2008).…”

“…For instance, some authors who favour legislative majority rule justify a decision-making process in which parties make grand logrolls and bargains across different issues (McGann 2006), whereas others argue that equality requires separable issues to be decided separately (Ward and Weale 2010;Weale 2013). Similarly, some proponents of proportional representation find it desirable that proportionally elected parties form pre-electoral coalitions (see Shugart 2001), whereas others consider such pre-electoral coalition-building to be normatively irrelevant or even undesirable (Christiano 1996;McGann 2006).…”

Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

“…In terms of the median voter criterion, for example, we might understand the Westminster vision as trying to approximate the 'global' median voter in an essentially unidimensional political space and the proportional vision as trying to approximate the issue-specific median voter in a multidimensional space (cf. Powell 2000, 165, 256, n. 169;Stecker and Tausendpfund 2016;Ward and Weale 2010). …”