Everything about Majority Rule totally explained
Majority rule is a characteristic of
political systems in which the
majority of a population plays a role in decision-making. Political systems with majority rule are
majoritarian while those with
minority rule are minoritarian.
Majority Voting
Voting systems are often designed to select among options (such as candidates or alternative courses of action) according to the majority wishes. When there are only two alternatives the choice of the majority can be determined without any problems: whichever option gets more votes is declared the
collective choice. If both alternatives get the same number of votes or there are more than two alternatives, a more complex voting process is necessary.
What is the majority choice?
In cases with more than two alternatives under consideration, it's more difficult to say which alternative is preferred by the majority, as the following example will show, where a group of five individuals (A, B, C, D, E) has to choose one out of four alternatives (w, x, y, z). We assume that each individual can order their alternatives in terms of preference. That is, each individual would prefer overall that a particular alternative is chosen but has second, third, and fourth place alternatives if their first place alternative doesn't receive enough votes to win. Suppose these preferences are:
» :::
The table shows that now a majority prefers s+v+x to t+w+y. This result is quite the opposite of the former results gained by voting separately on each issue.
The bundle s+v+x now is preferred not only by a majority of voters but is even unanimously preferred by all the voters.
This means that s+v+x is superior to t+w+y according to the Pareto criterion.
Voting on each issue separately may thus lead to suboptimal results.
This is a rather strong argument against “direct democracy” and the indiscriminate use of referenda on single issues.
Criticism of Majority Rule
Majority rule and minority rights
Under majority rule, it's possible for 51% of the population to make choices which are against the interests of the other 49% of the population. For example, the majority could vote to strip all land and money from the minority. This possibility is known as the
tyranny of the majority.
One way to safeguard against such scenarios is to guarantee certain
rights. Who gets to vote and their
equal rights can be decided beforehand as a separate act, by
charter or
constitution. Thereafter, any decision that unfairly targets a minority's right could be said to be majoritarian, but wouldn't be a
legitimate example of a majority decision because it would violate the requirement for
equal rights.
Why Half?
A majority is defined as "more than half", but there's no fundamental reason that this should this be the deciding number. Certain voting systems require larger majorities, such as the two-thirds (66%)
supermajority required to pass a
constitutional amendment in the United States.
Going even further, there are groups which require all decisions to be made by
consensus, that is, unanimous agreement. Clearly, consensus decision-making in all cases would be ideal, but it isn't clear how to achieve this in practice, especially for large groups or very contentious issues.
Further Information
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