Abizadeh on Majoritarianism

Majoritarianism seems pretty intuitive: when there is a disagreement, the faction with the most members should win. Why? Because every person’s view should be treated equally. It can’t be denied that there are objections to this very simple intuition. One popular one comes from a position of epistocracy. Epistocrats argue that if some people’s views are “more intelligent,” perhaps resulting from superior evidence, or are considered more likely to be true for any other reason, their votes should be worth more. Another criticism may result from a concern for “persistent minorities.” Here, the problem is that some “sticky group,” say Basque or Canadienne separatists, may be faced with the problem that their advocacy always fails--election after election. They’re in a minority--and not just any sort of minority, but one that almost seems to define them--and may always be so. This seems to some observers to be terribly unfair. These critiques may conclude with the theory that the relevant minority--the “smart people” or the members of the non-dominant culture--ought not to have to obey the majority. After all, the majority is either likely to be wrong (because stupid)* or certain to be oppressive (because dismissive of repeated dissents).

One traditional manner of attempting to maintain some level of majoritarianism in the face of such criticisms is the use of federalism. The supporter of fairly autonomous subdivisions can try to assuage the epistocrat by pointing out that the locals are much more likely to know precisely what is going on than (even the arguably smarter) folks who form their opinions from a considerable distance. And the defenders of separatism may be satisfied if they are given their own political subdivisions where, if not all, at least a considerable portion of their public policy may be developed without outside interference from groups with persistently different outlooks.

The extent to which federalization is anti-democratic is controversial, partly because both the boundary lines of the subdivisions and the areas of policy that are to be free from “outside interference” may be, to a great extent, arbitrary and thus, subject to intense disagreement. Furthermore, it may be doubted whether the locals really do know more about what they’re doing than outside experts, and the creation of, e.g., a French Canadienne region in Ontario would quite likely create a new “minority”: the English-speaking folk within the new district.

These are long-standing, probably intractable issues, and I certainly will not try to make any headway with them here. My interest today is rather in a recently published paper according to which democracy doesn’t require majority rule in the first place, and which concludes that federalism, rather than producing any deficit in democracy, is a democracy enhancer not in spite of its anti-majoritarian aspects, but because of them. For Arash Abizadeh, democratic procedures must be untethered from majoritarianism because it was a mistake to ever closely associate the two concepts in the first place.

Abizadeh begins his discussion by noting what he and others have taken to be the characteristics of majoritarianism that make it uniquely appropriate--even definatory--of democracy. First, there is the (a priori, not “real world”) equiprobability of each voter’s decision being the action that changes the election result. It also makes voter determinations (again a priori) independent of the determinations of all other voters. In addition, majoritarianism provides anonymity. which is the property that ensures that swapping the same number of yea votes or nay votes between any groups of voters cannot change the outcome. Finally, majority rule supplies neutrality, a property that requires that the decision rule itself is perfectly indifferent to what is being voted on.

Abizadeh does not deny that majority rule has any of these essential-to-democracy characteristics, but he suggests that they cannot be sufficient, since other decision rules, like choosing winners through various sorts of lotteries seem to have them too. Certainly, a selection rule having all the properties of neutrality, independence, anonymity and equiprobability may not provide democracy. That’s because democratic decision-making is essentially a method that allows some group to get what they want. That is, no selection rule that is not essentially a voting rule can provide democracy. For in random selection procedures, only one person--or even nobody at all!--may get to indicate her preferences. Abizadeh recognizes this additional constraint on democracy-providing properties when he points to the importance of political agency. He notes that while both dictatorships and lotteries may give each voter an equal amount of agency (or power), majority rule provides the maximum possible a priori voting power to each potential voter.

But in Abizadeh’s view there’s a problem in thinking that equal, maximal (a priori) democratic agency is sufficient for democracy. This can be seen, he thinks, when one considers that representative government itself seems to be inconsistent with the fair distribution of voter power. He writes, “those who defend a majoritarian conception of democracy by appeal to political equality have no leg to stand on once they move from direct to representative democracy.” On his view, with the introduction of representative government (a “two-tier procedure”) majority rule is fatally compromised, because when voters are not involved in the final selection of appointees or policies, “maximizing overall a priori voting power will often sharply clash with equalizing a priori voting power.” That is the sum and substance of what Abizadeh calls his “internal critique,” which, he believes, “reveals the majoritarian conception of democracy to be incoherent.”

This is a very serious charge, so let's look at this argument that majoritarianism is self-contradictory more closely. I believe it’s quite correct that the use of representative government is not inherent to democracy, which may be either direct or representative. There are oft-discussed merits and problems associated with both types, but each can be democratic so long as equally-treated group members are given the opportunity to indicate what they want, and their voices are accurately aggregated and acted upon. Whatever the problems of representative government, however, most of the well-known difficulties associated with representation and delegation are entirely separate from the problems that “two-tier” elections have been shown to create for majority rule. The latter specifically involve such atrocities as the U.S. Electoral College, in which the existence of widely different state populations do clearly de-democratize Presidential elections (just as, of course, the institution of the EC was intended to do). The point is that these specific voting-for-elector problems, which also come up in university appointments, are not solved by federalization: they are actually caused by the devolution of the electorate into separate voting blocs--something that is, of course, required by federalism. That is, as considerable literature on this matter has demonstrated, there is no majority deficit problem with two-tier voting so long as there are no subsidiary units of voters doing the selecting of the ultimate electors. Thus, majority rule is not undone by representation in this context, but by federalism—or at least by the creation of political subdivisions. While  separation of some sub-group into a new country might cure this defect--so long as the new country has no voting subdivisions--so could an absolutely unitary government without the creation of the new polity.

I make here no argument against federalism or other forms of devolution, and I don’t mean to suggest that there are no difficult puzzles produced as soon as a group begins to include appointments or policymaking by delegates who are supposed to be representative of the general electorate in some manner or other. Examples of such problems were recently brought to light by two cases in the U.S. Supreme Court involving so-called “faithless electors”--and have come up in many other contexts involving corruption, dereliction of duty, incompetence, etc. since the days of Plato. But the particular problem of interest here--that of an increase in majority deficit connected with two-tier voting--is actually created by the partitioning of voters into subsidiary units, and (if there were no other relevant considerations, which, of course, there are) could be undone by dissolution of the units and reabsorption of voters into a unitary electorate. In a word, no sub-units, no majority deficits. And there is nothing about the concepts either of majoritarianism or representation from which the devolution of voting segments may be inferred.

So much for Abizadeh’s “internal incoherence” critique. The author moves on from there to what he takes to be the obvious, real-world deficiencies of majoritarianism. These involve, first and foremost, the above-mentioned difficulties associated with persistent minorities. On these matters he is much more convincing...but also much less original. In a (to my mind unnecessarily complicated manner), he argues that certain persistent minorities--those which are likely to have significantly less economic power than the dominant majority--have been dealt hands, indeed hands after hands after hands, that seem on their face to be coming from stacked decks. Abizadeh points out that the political views of the members of such minorities should be expected to be closely correlated: this generally results in a regular struggle by group members to get a single one of their programs implemented. Abizadeh suggests that the solution to such problems involves a recognition of the power in numbers, i.e., facing up to the fact that democracy is largely a matter of group dynamics in which individual choices ought not to be aggregated in any manner that entirely abstracts votes from their relevant surroundings and their implications for a posteriori voting power. Where there is no such recognition, or it is not appropriately dealt with by federalization, Abizadeh believes that members of these groups may be justified in ignoring majority edicts. He may well be right, but it should be clear that such actions/resistance need not be considered to reflect a greater appreciation for democracy. I believe, on the contrary, that what they would indicate is that members of such sub-groups have concluded that democracy does not offer solutions to many of their intractable troubles.

What I think Abizadeh misses here is that democratic procedures should never have been thought to have made those sorts of promises in the first place. Democracy cannot not prevent indifference to minorities, and is even consistent with certain types of cruelty to them. This can (and, in a sense, should) happen wherever a majority is indifferent or cruel. Abizadeh seems determined to make democracy consistent with his views of fairness and decency—or at least with some sort of equality of a posteriori calculation of voting power. But the goal of democracy is neither fairness nor decency of that kind, but simply self-government. It is neither more nor less than the way in which the people in some group (i.e., the majority) can get what they want. It must indeed prevent certain types of discrimination, provide equal protection to each person, and must even lend helping hands to ensure that each group member is provided with a broad array of enforceable political rights. This understanding of authentic democracy thus has those features that Abizadeh associates with what he calls “thick majoritarianism,” But, no matter how thick, democracy should not be thought to ensure a kind or gentle polity by guaranteeing the a posteriori equality of individual voter agency—even if it could.

Of course, everyone is free to exalt lovely goals other than democracy, just as Abizadeh does in this article. Certainly, there is no disgrace in making generosity or fair distribution of wealth or appreciation for indigenous cultures one’s summum bonum: it may even display great virtue. What no one should do, however, is try to bend the concept of democracy in an attempt to show that we can be good small “d” democrats even when we are actually looking hither and yon for ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.

*I spend a good deal of space on refuting epistocratic notions of democracy in my book.