When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures

Abstract

In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in which individuals with conflicting preferences need to make a collective decision. They judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. We experimentally manipulated whether the group contains a vulnerable minority – a smaller number of people with more at stake than the majority. In all five countries, participants generally preferred voting without a vulnerable minority, with relatively greater support for voting in more democratic countries. But, when the group included a vulnerable minority, participants in all countries reduced their support for voting and instead preferred consensus.

Distributing Democratic Influence: External Efficacy and the Preferred Influence of Policy Winners and Losers

“…Whelan, 1983;Saunders, 2012;Bengtson, 2021). One plausible explanation for this is that the division between negatively and positively affected groups does not align well with the sorts of differences-such as those driven by vulnerability, historical injustices, or economic resources-that past research suggests people actually care about (e.g., Krimmel & Rader, 2015;Bor et al, 2021;Rasmussen & Reher, 2022).…”

Democratic mind: Under what conditions can political intuitions help us sustain democratic checks and balances?

“…The first theoretical proposition, focusing on the individual level, is that behind expressed democratic attitudes and citizens' actions, there are particular sets of politically relevant intuitions. This proposition follows from 'intuitive political theory' (Bor, Mazepus, Bokemper, DeScioli 2021;DeScioli & Bokemeper 2019, Nettle & Saxe 2021. Intuitions are outputs of cognitive mechanisms activated automatically by the information received by any individual from their socio-political environment (Farrel, Mercier, Schwartzberg 2022).…”

“…To achieve the objectives of DEMOMIND, an interdisciplinary research team will be established: the PI with expertise in comparative political science , political intuitions (Bor et al 2021), survey experiments (e.g., Mazepus & Van Leeuwen 2020), and research on checks and balances (Mazepus 2023); Post-doc 1 with expertise in anthropology; Post-doc 2 with expertise in agent-based models; and 2 PhD students trained in political science or psychology with an interest in political psychology. The timeline and tasks are detailed in Table 3.…”

What experiments can teach us about justice and impartiality: vindicating experimental political philosophy

“…Narrow equilibrium is thus already a philosophical reconstruction, through which philosophers strive to bring to light the 2 Another domain which has recently benefited from fruitful collaborations between philosophers and empirical scientists is the theory of democracy, particularly regarding the epistemic value of deliberation and majority voting. For some examples, see Bor et al, 2021;Mercier et al, 2021;Mercier & Landemore, 2012. underlying coherent moral principles that manifest themselves through various, sometimes inconsistent, popular opinions. However, Rawls' method of reflective equilibrium does not presuppose that everyone shares the same moral conceptions, as Rawls explicitly acknowledges the possibility of moral pluralism.…”