Our work has evolved in the last 30 years, from reducing prejudice to tackling systemic injustice. Grade Level. At various times in our history, lack of minority representation in government has allowed the majority to abuse minority rights: In , the Charlestown, Mass.
When the local Catholic Church applied for burial privileges—the same right that everyone else in town had—the elected council was able simply to refuse. Following the emancipation of the slaves—and passage of the 14 th Amendment—many all-white local and state governments enacted laws that restricted the rights of the black minority. In the s, some towns and states passed measures legalizing discrimination against gays and lesbians.
Text Dependent Questions. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a certain current of historical research made an ideology of majority rule and dismissed the consensus principle as primitive. We have to abandon such notions. Ethnologists have had little difficulty in showing that every culture has pronounced individualistic features, even if those features occur in myriad areas.
But if this explanation of the consensus principle is false, then its conclusion regarding majority rule must be specious. Today political anthropology disposes of a wealth of material yielding information on decision-making processes in the most widely varying cultures; and in fact the principle of consensus predominates. But there appear to be many paths to solidarity, and many of them are not so far removed from majority decisions.
For political scientists the consensus principle is no longer an inexplicable problem. Today one can name the exact conditions under which unanimity rule functions.
The key to understanding the consensus principle is first of all the degree of intensity, and secondly, delayed reciprocity I will be simplifying here so that we can fast-forward to the Greeks. In political reality, decision-maker preferences are never equally strong [3].
If a small group intensely advocates option a, while a larger group supports option b but only in a half-hearted way, then consensus will be achieved through the lukewarm majority yielding to the passionate minority; and this they can do because their preference is weaker Sartori, 83ff. This disposition does not just fall from the sky, but has at least two preconditions:.
It proceeds along strict lines of performance which must be inculcated through practice. If the yielding party is disadvantaged, then parties will cease to be yielding. The yielding party must be able to count on the fact that his yielding is not interpreted as weakness or defeat, and that in the future when he intensely advocates an option, his opposite number will yield. Consequently, the consensus principle always functions best in small groups where everyone knows each other [6].
What is the advantage of such a consensus principle? Simple: all participants play a positive-sum game, i. In the best-case scenario, no one loses and everyone wins with delayed reciprocity [7]. Majority rule is the exact opposite: under less-than-ideal circumstances it tends to become a zero-sum game, one side winning and the other side losing. The disadvantage of the consensus principle is the high decisions costs.
In other words, the expenditure in time, rhetoric, gestures, and appeals to good will can be enormously high; and that happens as soon as several group members advocate their respective preferences with the same intensity.
If no side in the conflict gives ground over several hours or even days, this means an enormous expenditure in time and rhetoric. Perhaps they arrive at a compromise that pleases no one; and in the worst case the community is incapable of forming a general will; it is paralyzed; perhaps it even breaks apart. The decision costs sink if the decision-makers of a certain group are ethnically homogeneous and have real solidarity. Thus, the establishment of homogeneity in many communities is a top political priority.
This has important cultural repercussions [8]. Why this detour through sociology and political anthropology? Because I require a differentiated inventory to tell how the consensus principle functions in various cultures; this inventory helps me to find those variations that lead to the majority principle [9] In principle there are three possibilities.
All approve the resolution and intend to abide by it. In such a case the political optimum has been achieved.
No consensus has been achieved on the basis of the two options, but rather a compromise between the options. Neither side has adopted the option of the other; instead several groupings have yielded in some places and remained intractable in others. Three disadvantages: 1 Most of the time this is patently the worst solution ; 2 Because the group of decision-makers cannot agree to adopt the most intensely advocated preference of a certain party, they consent to the option that can somehow be reconciled with their own respective preferences; neither side advocates this alternative option, since neither side really wants it; 3 The principle of delayed reciprocity fails, for the payback is not delayed but ad hoc.
Thus one can see that the consensus principle no longer functions, or only qualifiedly so. Such a community is less capable of acting than the first [10]. How does that work? The duty to follow finds frequent mention in medieval European texts, but is seldom justified in any way e.
By contrast, the statutes of many Buddhist monasteries in India and Japan justify the duty to follow through ethical and political arguments e.
Of all non-European cultures, the Japanese reacted with greatest alacrity to the challenge thrown up by the West. Was this perhaps owing to their ability to simply ratchet up their political organizing skills? The third variation c is the most interesting one historically. In this moment there are two possible developments which are of central importance to political anthropology; and it is of world-historical significance which of these paths is chosen.
It remains unsatisfied because a non-decision was desired by neither side. Should the situation repeat itself, then it leads to an inability of the group to politically resolve incendiary issues. It loses its ability to act politically; it ceases to be a political community; it loses the ability to wage war, for its constituents are now operating on their own initiative.
The intensity of one side or another no longer plays a role, for in this regard it is a standoff. Instead, there is another quantitative criterion qualitative criteria necessarily playing no role , namely the strength of the respective sides. In this case, the will to remain capable of acting as a group is greater than the will not to yield to the other side. In other words, collective values and norms relevant to the community are stronger here than above.
Under certain conditions, such a group can enormously strengthen its ability to act. In what relation does variation c stand to the possibility of a majority decision?
In principle, one can say that if the weaker side yields because the stronger side is numerically greater, then one is on the threshold of a majority decision. But what happens when a part of the minority will not follow the majority? Then norms collide because political conceptions are at odds: the minority clings to the principle that something is valid only if they agree to it, while the majority insists on the duty to follow.
Such confrontations have led many sociologists to judge that majority decisions emerge from conflict. Georg Simmel has given the classic formulation of this. But that is to confuse the cause with its effect. Confrontation only came after the duty to follow was ignored, its non-fulfillment then provoking the compulsion. It is not only historically more accurate but simpler to deduce majority decision from the duty to follow. Search for: 'majority rule' in Oxford Reference ». All Rights Reserved.
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Recently viewed 0 Save Search. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. And they include the unenumerated ones affirmed in the Constitution's Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Which brings me, by an admittedly circuitous route, back to , to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and to Lincoln's noble recoil from "popular sovereignty in the territories.
For many years and for several reasons, many of my fellow conservatives have unreflectively and imprudently celebrated "judicial restraint. It is, however, high time for conservatives to rethink what they should believe about the role of courts in the American regime.
Another reason many conservatives favor judicial deference and restraint is what can be called the conservative populist temptation.
But the essential drama of democracy derives from the inherent tension between the natural rights of the individual and the constructed right of the community to make such laws as the majority deems necessary and proper.
Natural rights are affirmed by the Declaration of Independence; majority rule, circumscribed and modulated, is constructed by the Constitution. Timothy Sandefur of the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, in his book The Conscience of the Constitution , rightly emphasizes that the Declaration is not just chronologically prior to the Constitution, it is logically prior.
Liberty is the goal at which democracy aims, not the other way around. The progressive project, now entering its second century, has been to reverse this by giving majority rule priority over liberty when the two conflict, as they inevitably and frequently do. This reflects the progressive belief that rights are the result of government; they are "spaces of privacy" that government "has chosen to carve out and protect.
If the sole, or overriding, goal of the Constitution can be reduced to establishing democracy, and if the distilled essence of democracy is that majorities shall rule in whatever sphere of life where majorities wish to rule, then the Court is indeed a "deviant institution.
It is excessive to say, as often has been said, that the Constitution is "undemocratic" or "anti-democratic" or "anti-majoritarian. The principle of judicial restraint, distilled to its essence, frequently is the principle that an act of the government should be presumed constitutional and that the party disputing the act's constitutionality bears the heavy burden of demonstrating the act's unconstitutionality beyond a reasonable doubt.
The contrary principle of judicial engagement is that the judiciary's principal duty is the defense of liberty, and that the government, when challenged, bears the burden of demonstrating that its action is in conformity with the Constitution's architecture, the purpose of which is to protect liberty.
The federal government can dispatch this burden by demonstrating that its action is both necessary and proper for the exercise of an enumerated power. A state or local government can dispatch the burden by demonstrating that its act is within the constitutionally proscribed limits of its police power. Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court has cogently addressed, and largely dissolved, the supposed counter-majoritarian difficulty. There are, he says, two different but not equal majorities involved.
He begins, as judicial review began, in , with Marbury v. Madison , in which Chief Justice John Marshall wrote: "The powers of the Legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the Constitution is written. And "desirable" is not a synonym for "constitutional. Although "[t]he political branches decide if laws pass," it is for courts to decide "if laws pass muster," he continues. So, "[i]f judicial review means anything, it is that judicial restraint does not allow everything.
Because, says Willett, the Texas constitution, like the U. Constitution, is "irrefutably framed in proscription. Judicial review means preventing any contemporary majority from overturning yesterday's supermajority, the one that ratified the Constitution. Federal judges are accountable to no current constituency. But when construing the Constitution, they are duty-bound to be faithful to the constituency of those who framed and ratified it. This, says Willett, is the profound difference between an improperly activist judge and a properly engaged judge.
The former creates rights that are neither specified in nor implied by the Constitution. The latter defends rights the framers actually placed there and prevents the elected branches from usurping the judiciary's duty to "declare what the Constitution means.
It is not true that, as Dr. Often, but not always. And here, naturally, we return once more to Lincoln. By his noble rejection of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the idea of popular sovereignty as the way to decide the question of slavery in the territories, Lincoln concentrated our minds on two timeless truths.
One is that majority rule is inevitable, but not inevitably reasonable. The other is that moral reasoning properly done, and the Constitution properly construed, both affirm that many things should be beyond the reach of majorities. Forgot password? The Limits of Majority Rule.
George F. Will is a nationally syndicated columnist. Previous Article. Insight from the Archives.
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