An ambiguous tool of demos accountability: taking the metaphorical concept of majoritarian tyranny seriously

ABSTRACT

Even before the invention of modern democracy, political theorists have warned about the dangers of ‘majoritarian tyrannies.’ While the concept has been perennially suspicious of serving as an antidemocratic stratagem, I propose to revalue it as an antipopulist tool of horizontal accountability among citizens (‘demos accountability’). Subverting the populist narrative of popular unity and virtue, it allows aggrieved minorities to call their majoritarian fellow citizens to account for the injustices they help to produce. Given its metaphorical quality, however, its rootedness in the image of the personal tyrant, the idea of majoritarian tyranny carries deep democratic ambiguities. To recognize these ambiguities, I argue, we need to resist the suggestive power of its animating metaphor and take the empirical complexities of its logical building blocks seriously: the exercise of tyranny, the exclusive targeting of minorities, and collective action by the majority. My stepwise analytical reconstruction of these three constitutive elements of majoritarian tyrannies reveals two metaphorical pitfalls that threaten the democratic fertility of the concept: its vilifying and its simplifying assumptions.

Keywords:

• Democracy
• majoritarian tyranny
• democratic injustice
• metaphorical concepts
• demos accountability

Introduction

The ‘preoccupation with the rights and wrongs of majority rule has run like a red thread through American political thought since 1789’ (Dahl 1956: 4). ‘Like a nagging tooth’ (124), it has haunted democratic theory and practice alike, inside as well as outside the US. Again and again, political theorists have reflected on normative limits to majoritarian rule and political actors have denounced their practical transgression. ‘In a democracy,’ we hear over and over again, ‘there is nothing more dangerous than the tyranny of the majority.’¹ The danger of ‘majoritarian oppression’ is ‘the very thing that most threatens the existence of democracy’ (Beahm 2002: 1).

Concerns about the oppressive dispositions of democratic majorities have been part and parcel of political theory since the invention of direct democracy in ancient Greece and were renewed with the invention of representative democracy in the American Revolution.² During the closing decades of the twentieth century, the focus of democratic anxieties shifted from the tyranny of majorities to their disempowerment in the face of globalization, technocracy, and anti-majoritarian institutions.³ Today, however, as populist actors in both new and old democracies claim to revert the secular disempowerment of popular majorities, deep worries about ‘extreme majoritarianism’ (Mudde and Rovira 2017, 95) have resurged at both sides of the political spectrum.⁴

Further trends and events have converged to reinforce the contemporary revival of concerns about ‘the tyranny of the majority’ (TM), often with dramatic undertones. Consider, for instance, the use of simple-majority referenda to decide vital political issues, such as political membership (the UK ‘Brexit’ referendum)⁵ and minority rights (referenda on same-sex marriage in various US states),⁶ the resurgence of fears during the ill-named Arab Spring that democratization in deeply religious societies might produce tyrannies of intolerant, pious majorities,⁷ and the stepwise subversion of democracy by illiberal heads of governments, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who claim to enjoy majoritarian support by voters.⁸

Majoritarian decisions are inseparable from democracy. Simple-majority rules embody the foundational democratic principle of equality. No other decision rule is superior in giving equal weight to citizens.⁹ Democratic majorities, however, do not wield absolute power. They must rule within bounds. Yet where exactly do those bounds lie? What exactly do they protect? The standard answer is, of course, ‘minority rights.’ But what are these? And what else? While the language of ‘minority rights’ suggests that the limits to majoritarian governance are well-bound and consensual, they tend to be open-ended and contentious. Arguably, public claims about ‘majoritarian tyrannies’ serve to discern, defend, and shift these boundaries. They serve as rhetorical instruments in democratic border disputes. In the language I am proposing here, they serve as tools of ‘demos accountability,’ that is, of horizontal accountability among citizens.

For long, with its critique of democratic overreach, the notion of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ has invited democratic suspicions. It has been suspicious of being no more than a cover for defending the status of elites who disdain the egalitarian ethos of democracy. Historically, ‘minorities of wealth, status, and power’ who distrust the wisdom of ordinary citizens and fear for their extraordinary privileges have used the concept as a ‘protective ideology’ or a ‘convenient rationalization’ (Dahl 1956, 30) for demanding antidemocratic veto powers (see, e.g. Przeworski 2010, Ch. 6).

While admitting its potential for abuse, I acknowledge the concept’s potential for democratic self-protection and self-correction. In abstract terms, it suggests a general critique of democracy. In concrete terms, however, it articulates specific charges against the demos – not against ordinary people outside time and place, but against the policies of concrete democratic majorities here and now. The language of majoritarian tyranny, I posit, allows minorities who are affected by a democratic decision to ask their majoritarian co-citizens to revalue and reconsider it in the light of the burdens it imposes. Instead of conceiving such requests as antidemocratic, I propose to conceive them as antipopulist. By highlighting dissent and pluralism within the citizenry, they reject the populist equation of ‘the majority’ with ‘the people’ (see Müller 2017; Urbinati 2019), and by denouncing the majority as an agent of injustice, they reject populist presumptions of its quasi-divine virtuousness and infallibility (see Mudde and Rovira 2017).

However, while I propose to revalue the notion of TM as an instrument of accountability among citizens, I introduce strong caveats. The concept is a metaphor that transposes the image of personal tyranny into the realm of collective action. It imagines ‘the whole people’ to act ‘like a single tyrant’ (Thomas Aquinas), ‘the multitude as one tyrant’ (Peter of Auvergne).¹⁰ It assumes that ‘the tyrannical power of one person, a minority, or the majority all belong to the same category’ (Nyirkos 2018, 56). Tyranny is tyranny, its proponents repeat once and again, ‘whether of one, a few, or many’ (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay [1788] 1987, 303).¹¹ Well, it is not. The ‘analogy of collective and individual power’ (Nyirkos 2018, 77) is false. The personal tyrant is not an analogue but a metaphor of the tyrannical majority. Tyrannies by democratic majorities are not equivalent to tyrannies by individual dictators. To the extent that they can said to exist at all, they are more complex, opaque, tenuous, and variegated.

If we wish to take the possibility of ‘tyrannical majorities’ seriously, we need to break the spell of the underlying metaphor of personal dictatorship and think through the logic of collective oppression in more realistic fashion. In this article, I will do so by examining, step by step, the grammatical structure or ‘story grammar’ (Franzosi 2004) of majoritarian tyrannies. At its logical core, the idea of ‘the tyranny of the majority’ contains two categories of actors – perpetrators (the majority M) and victims (the minority m) – and one category of actions – the operation of a tyrannical system or, more narrowly, the performance of tyrannical acts. In short: M tyrannizes m. This simple semantic triplet of subject, object, and action involves three logical presuppositions which are built into the very idea of majoritarian tyrannies: (1) the performance of tyrannical acts, (2) the exclusive targeting of minorities, and (3) collective action by the majority.

To comprehend the notion of TM we need to comprehend these three constitutive elements. The following sections will strive to advance their understanding, one at a time, by taking their empirical complexities seriously. Nonetheless, even if we manage to do so and even if we keep its complexities in mind when employing the concept, its inherent metaphorical resonance will stay with us and keep reverberating in public debate. As I will discuss in the final section of this essay, both the polemical surplus and the simplifying assumptions of its animating metaphor of the single tyrant debilitate the attractiveness of TM as a rhetorical tool of ‘demos accountability.’

Since its inception, the debate on ‘the tyranny of the majority’ has been haunted by a perplexing confusion about its subject: who is ‘the majority’ we are talking about? Since its origins, even before the invention of the term,¹² the debate has been concerned about ‘collective tyranny’ (Nyirkos 2018, 51) by common people: the demos, the plebs, the multitude, the mob, the masses, the citizenry. However, these concerns have often been entangled with others, very different ones, about tyrannies of minorities who rule in the name of majorities – be it with plausible claims of representation (as in the case of democratic legislative assemblies) or without them (as in the case of fascism or authoritarian populism). As Nyirkos states, ‘what looks like the tyranny of the majority is often only the tyranny of an imposing minority’ (2018, 34). In this essay, I exclude such false majoritarian tyrannies as they derive from errors of attribution. Instead, I take the original concern of the concept seriously and ask about the conceptual structure of tyrannies, not by representatives, whether legitimate or self-proclaimed, but by majorities of citizens. Authoritarian minorities who claim to be agents of popular majorities do not count as such. As their claims are fraudulent, their actions cannot give rise to ‘majoritarian tyrannies.’ The tyrannical behaviour of democratic representatives, by contrast, does indeed raise questions about co-responsibilities by the majoritarian citizenry. As I lay out below, it represents a special case of majoritarian agency.

Tyrannical acts

Though ‘[f]ew existing democracies [if any] are based on simple-majority rule’ (Przeworski 2010, L 1918), democracy is closely associated, and even equated, with majoritarian decision-making. No superior decision rule exists for putting the democratic idea of self-government among equals into practice. All others end up empowering the few over the many (Ch. 2.4). Still, ‘no one has ever advocated, and no one except its enemies has ever defined democracy to mean, that a majority would or should do anything it felt an impulse to do … every friendly definition of it ... includes the idea of restraints on majorities’ (Dahl 1956, 36). Yet what are such restraints on majoritarian government?

Of course, all governments face factual restraints, such as the demographic structure of their society or the fluctuation of commodity prices on the world market. They are also likely to accept prudential restraints vis-à-vis powerful political and social actors who are capable of derailing their policies. The debate about majoritarian tyranny, however, concerns normative constraints on democratic governance. Rather than asking what democratic majorities cannot do or would not want to do, it asks what they should not do. Which are legitimate restraints on the power of democratic majorities?

If the notion of ‘fundamental rights’ serves to ‘mark constraints on the ends we may pursue and the means we may adopt in politics’ (Waldron 1993, 400), the notion of ‘majoritarian tyrannies’ serves to mark constraints on the legitimate ends and means of political majorities. It places ‘limits on what can be justified’ (ibidem) within majoritarian democracy. It does so, however, in a peculiar way. It carries the paradoxical claim that democratic majorities act in antidemocratic ways (which renders the concept polemical); and it articulates this claim in an open, generic fashion (which turns it into an umbrella concept).

A polemical concept

In its literal sense, the notion of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ suggests that democratic majorities can act in a manner that turns democracy upside down. In modern political thought, after all, tyranny is understood to be the opposite of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy stands for equality, individual liberties, and popular control.¹³ Tyranny stands for hierarchy, oppression, and the monopolization of power. By common usage, a tyranny is a personal dictatorship, a ‘cruel and oppressive government […] by one who has absolute power without legal right.’¹⁴ It evokes adjectives like ‘oppressive,’ ‘violent,’ and ‘cruel.’¹⁵ Tyrannical power is unbound and unaccountable. Defined as ‘the abuse of the state’s coercive force in the absence of the rule of law,’ it implies ‘the arbitrary treatment of citizens, if not the systematic use of terror.¹⁶

The concept of democratic majoritarian tyrannies thus engages in a game of contradictions. Lying on opposite poles of the continuum of political regimes, democracy and tyranny are mutually incompatible. One excludes the other. If tyranny in its literal sense involves oppression without legal restraints, it is clear that liberal democracies may constitute true tyrannies against non-citizens (either through exclusionary membership rules that ban long-term residents from citizenship or through the authoritarian control of foreign territories and populations). It is also clear, however, that they cannot do the same against their citizens. It is hardly controversial (unless we conceive democracy as a system of justice by definition) that democratic majorities can enact unjust laws against minorities and hereby commit tyrannical acts against them. But they cannot subject them to tyrannical systems in the full sense of the word without ceasing to be democratic.¹⁷

Thus, if claims of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ in a democracy cannot denote literal tyrannies, but tyrannical policies only, we must not understand the concept as a descriptive one but a polemical one. By conceptual design, accusations of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ involve some measure of hyperbole or, more technically, some measure of ‘conceptual stretching’ (Sartori 1970, 1034). They do not literally refer to the presence of a despotic regime but point to abuses of majority power that amount to less than full-fledged tyranny. With polemical exaggeration, they denounce oppressive structures and practices within democratic regimes.¹⁸

An open concept

Thanks to its anchoring metaphor of the tyrant, the behavioural component of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ (the exercise of tyranny) seems rather self-evident. We all have vivid images of despotic leaders in our minds and need no one to educate us about the nature of tyrannical rule. The strength and clarity of the image of individual tyranny carries over to the metaphor of collective tyranny, which seems clear and strong as well. The very use of the common singular form in conversations about ‘the tyranny of the majority’ suggests that the term refers to a clear and well-bound category of action that requires little explication.

However, if we look beyond its abstract metaphorical core at its concrete uses in either ordinary or specialized language, it becomes immediately apparent that the concept does not denote a narrow, well-defined category of democratic norm transgressions but covers a wide range of accusations. Following Tamás Nyirkos, we can sort the empirical variety of conceptual applications into three broad and partially overlapping categories: a) the infringement of minority rights, b) the self-serving violation of minority interests, and c) the exercise of arbitrary power by the majority (see Nyirkos 2018, Ch. 1).¹⁹

Violations of minority rights

The clearest, paradigmatic instances of TM are those in which the majority deprives a minority of political rights and civil liberties that form an integral part of established notions of liberal democracy, such as active and passive suffrage rights; freedom of assembly, association, and speech; and religious freedom. Early on, during the founding decades of modern representative institutions, those political thinkers who warned against ‘the despotism of the majority’ (Tocqueville [1835] 2000),²⁰ were primarily worried about such majoritarian infringements of minority rights. When Alexander Hamilton highlighted the ‘importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part,’ he warned of majoritarian threats against ‘the rights of the minority,’ and in particular, its ‘civil rights’ and ‘religious rights’ (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay [1788] 1987, 312).²¹

Later conceptions of TM often retain the language of rights violations. Robert Dahl, for instance, defined tyranny as ‘every severe deprivation of natural rights’ (1956, 7). Others refer more loosely to ‘any violation’ of ‘the natural rights of minorities’ (El-Gaili 2004, 509). Authors commonly translate the vague notion of ‘natural rights’ into basic liberal-democratic rights, that is, rights which are either ‘integral to democracy’ or ‘fundamental to equal protection’ under democracy (Dahl 1956; see also Beahm 2002). Majorities may violate them in manifold ways: formal or informal, open or covert, direct or indirect, blunt or subtle.²²

While civil liberties protect citizens against ‘vertical’ oppression by the state, classic liberal thinkers were highly sensitive to the complementary need of protecting citizens against ‘horizontal’ oppression by their fellow citizens. When John Stuart Mill, in his incisive essay On Liberty ([1859] 1974), discussed ‘the tyranny of the majority’ as one of ‘the evils against which society requires to be on its guard’ (62), he did not warn primarily about abusive governments, but about illiberal societies. He cautioned against the social pressures of conformity that ‘the despotism of custom’ (136) and ‘the tyranny of opinion’ (132) exert against irritating worldviews, eccentric life styles, or presumptive vices, like dissipation or alcoholism. Even within a framework of legally guaranteed civil liberties, the ‘social tyranny’ (63) of intolerant, punitive majorities was liable to produce ‘gross usurpations upon the liberty of private life’ (156).

As assertions of ‘rights’ serve as ‘trumps’ (Waldron 1993, 394) over competing considerations, those who defend specific realms of private liberty against majoritarian regulation often insist on their recognition as ‘individual rights,’ as in contemporary debates on same-sex marriage,²³ pious clothing,²⁴ the construction of minarets,²⁵ or bans on the sale of sugary drinks.²⁶ Almost invariably (albeit oftentimes implicitly), they invoke John Stuart Mill’s ‘simple principle’ of liberty: ‘the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant’ (Mill [1859] 1974, 68).

Violations of minority interests

For Aristotle, the existence of a ‘tyrannical’ regime was not a matter of institutional structures but political motives: single rulers who govern for the common good are ‘kings,’ those who govern for their own good are ‘tyrants’ (1981, III.vii). Diagnoses of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ often carry analogous motivational assumptions. Majorities, they complain, do not care for the common good but pursue their self-interest at the expense of the minority. Their self-serving (or outright hostile) policies introduce substantive asymmetries in the distribution of rights and benefits. They injure the minority while sparing the majority. Even while they differ widely in the magnitude of perceived utility differentials between majorities and minorities,²⁷ such asymmetrical policies are generally thought to violate basic principles of fairness. While debates on substantive fairness are never simple and easy, in the relations between majorities and minorities they are further complicated by frequent inter-group asymmetries in preference intensities, objective stakes, and power resources.

Asymmetric relevance: The problem of differing intensities of subjective preferences among groups has haunted the debate on TM. ‘What if the minority prefers its alternative much more passionately than the majority prefers the contrary alternative? Does the majority principle still make sense?’ (Dahl 1956, 90).²⁸ In his careful discussion of varying distributions of preferences and preference intensities, Robert Dahl concluded that situations in which slight majorities with light policy preferences override passionate minorities may indeed constitute plausible instances of ‘Madison’s implicit concept of tyranny’ (1956, 99). However, as he pointed out, too, preference intensities are elusive (see 99–100). They are unobservable and amenable to strategic manipulation. Minority groups may engage in ‘intensity falsification’ to extract policy concessions from majorities.²⁹ For example, denouncing majoritarian decisions that require the registration of sporting guns,³⁰ ban firearms from university campuses,³¹ or outlaw fox hunting,³² as acts of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ strikes the unarmed observer as pretty idiosyncratic.

Asymmetric stakes: Similar problems of unequal affectation may arise from dissimilar objective stakes. When majorities have no objective interest in an issue that is vital to the life of a minority of citizens, their very capacity to decide it may look tyrannical to the affected minority (see Brighouse and Fleurbahaey 2010).

Asymmetric power: Claims of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ often do not rest upon assessments of costs, but assessments of power. Rather than highlighting the costs majoritarian policies impose on minorities, they stress the temporal dimension of majoritarian power: its permanence. When unchangeable and impenetrable majorities defeat structural minorities again and again, when they pursue self-interested, winner-take-all policies without exception or compromise, when they always play their favourite games among themselves and refuse ‘taking turns’ (Guinier 1994), then minorities can be excused for reaching the conclusion that they face a paradigmatic instance of majoritarian tyranny.

Arbitrary power

Both categories of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ I have discussed so far demand that democratic majorities commit or permit ‘serious’ or ‘severe’ (and at times recurrent and irreversible) violations of minority rights or interests. Only one category of TM does not require weighing the substantive severity of anti-minoritarian policies, namely, majoritarian decisions that involve procedural, rather than substantive injustices against minorities: the exercise of arbitrary power that refuses to listen or explain.

Majorities signal that they do not care about an affected minority when they take their decisions ‘by sheer force of numbers,’³³ without listening to the minority, without taking its viewpoints into account, or without providing public reasons that justify their decisions (see also Beahm 2002: 243). Such inconsiderate majorities breach their procedural obligations of democratic ‘responsiveness’ (Dahl 1971, 1–2; Pitkin 1967, 233). In the eyes of minorities who feel disregarded and disrespected, they reveal their tyrannical indifference with singular clarity when they fail to show consideration, not just towards grand historical demands of minority groups, but ‘even towards their petty demands.’³⁴

Overall, empirical uses of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ in either academic or ordinary political language cover a wide range of situations. In general, they do not describe tyrannical acts of despotism in a literal sense (arbitrary physical repression), but milder normative transgressions. Do they have some abstract common denominator? Scholarly debates on majoritarian tyrannies have typically engaged in efforts of ‘conceptual legislation’ (Sartori 1984, 54 and 62–63), trying to circumscribe majoritarian transgressions that can plausibly be described as ‘tyrannical’ (see, e.g. Dahl 1956; Beahm 2002; Fishkin 1979). Recorded varieties of applications, however, need not be considered an illness to be cured through ‘linguistic therapy’ (Eco 1989). Rather than striving to identify the semantic essence of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ beneath its multiple uses, we may understand its operational openness as essential to its usage. If the ‘meaning of a word is its use in the language’ (Wittgenstein [1952] 1968, § 43), the meaning of TM lies in its practical versatility, its multifaceted and open nature. Its abstract metaphorical core allows for ‘many possible meanings’ (Nyirkos 2018, 4) at the concrete level of application. It serves as an open conceptual umbrella that invites minorities to articulate problems of justification of majoritarian decision – any problems, not just certain classes of problems. The concrete grounds of dispute are left open (see also Waldron 1993).

Tyrannical boundaries

The idea of tyrannical relationships presupposes a clear, binary distinction of roles between tyrants and subjects, that is, agents and targets of tyrannical treatment. In systems of personalized power, such as patriarchal families or personal dictatorships, these classic polar roles—of masters and slaves, commanders and servants, oppressors and oppressed—are easy to identify. In transparent hierarchies of power with unipersonal centres of command, there is little doubt about who is who and who does what to whom.

Yet, when tyrannical relations do not unfold between individuals, but social groups, as in majoritarian tyrannies, the neat separation of roles between tyrants and their subjects may turn uncertain, as it presupposes (1) that the boundaries between the tyrannical group and the victim group are clear and stable and (2) that the harmful consequences of tyrannical acts exclusively affect the latter, but not the former. When either their boundaries or the consequences of their acts are diffuse, collective tyrants easily turn into self-damaging tyrants who tyrannize themselves as they tyrannize others.

Clear and stable boundaries

Theorists of TM tend to conceive of majorities and minorities as fixed, preestablished ‘homogenous entities’ which are ‘sociologically well-defined’ (Nyirkos 2018, 96 and 58), both objectively (at the level of observable traits) and subjectively (in their collective identities): the poor against the rich, the dominant religion against religious minorities, the ethnic majority against ethnic minorities. In democracies that are divided by a single cleavage or multiple overlapping cleavages that sort their citizens into neat, immutable categories of unequal size, such a reification of social categories is plausible. In such contexts of rigid, one-dimensional conflict, the vague quantitative categories of ‘the many’ against ‘the few’ carry concrete, commonsensical meaning, and the fear that unchanging minorities risk permanent defeat or oppression by unchanging majorities reflects tangible social realities.

As James Madison famously posited in Federalist Paper 51, ‘[i]f a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.’ In his view, a ‘multiplicity of interests’ and a ‘multiplicity of sects’ offer the best protection against ‘injustice’ and ‘reiterated oppressions’ by majoritarian coalitions (321). In the face of multiple cross-cutting cleavages, minorities may still experience painful losses through majoritarian decisions, but they know that relations of power are contingent and fluid and that the losers of today can turn into the victors of tomorrow. By contrast, in societies with convergent, mutually reinforcing cleavages, majoritarian tyrannies are more likely to arise and less likely to be transitory and reversible. They tend to congeal into durable systems of domination, which are the paradigmatic instances of TM (see, e.g. Dahl 1956, 30; Guinier 1994; Sunstein 2018, 67).

Prototypical cases of permanent ‘majoritarian tyrannies’ involve a clear separation of roles between perpetrators (the majority) and victims (the minority). They involve ‘easily identifiable minorities’ (Fleck and Hanssen 2013, 317) that possess dichotomous criteria of membership (you either belong or you don’t) and carry visible markers of membership (such as distinctive skin colour, language, clothing, ornamentation, and hair design). Forming ‘discrete and insular minorities’ (Cox 2013, 248), they are easily discerned and thus easily discriminated against.

For TM to become institutionalized, though, it is not sufficient for group boundaries to be clear; they must also be stable. Few social boundaries are entirely fixed and impenetrable, however. Ethnic boundaries and regional identities may shift or dissolve through cultural change, migration, and intermarriage; religious boundaries through conversion or secularization; language boundaries through learning; class cleavages through economic development, redistribution, or social mobility; and ideological divisions through tidal changes in social mores and worldviews. Accordingly, ‘in the long run everyone may become part of the minority’ (Nyirkos 2018, 58).

To create, reinforce, and stabilize the boundaries between friends and foes, both majority and minority groups often engage in multiple forms of boundary politics. They regulate and police inter-group boundaries, for instance, by imposing strict rules of membership, demanding outward displays of group loyalty, banning conversion, and punishing contact across groups.³⁵ To the extent that hostile majorities or reclusive minorities ‘succeed’ in erecting firm and solid walls between each other, they put into place the primary practical condition for establishing and entrenching majoritarian tyranny: the constitution of its protagonists.

Selective oppression

Even when the distinction between majority and minority groups is clear-cut, aspiring tyrannical majorities still need to figure out how to hurt minorities without hurting themselves. Of course, they may hurt themselves in indirect ways. National minorities often make significant contributions to a nation’s economic prosperity, political pluralism, and cultural wealth. Punishing and discouraging them, pushing them to the margins or even out of society, is likely to impoverish everybody, not just the affected minority.

Yet tyrannical majorities may hurt themselves in more direct ways, too. Oppression tends to be expansive. It is hard to confine. Once a majority consents to depriving its co-citizens of their rights and liberties, it may be forfeiting its own rights and liberties. Once a government has begun to violate the political rights or civil liberties of a minority, it may face few obstacles to widen the circles of oppression beyond its initial target. Revolutions have the habit of devouring their children. Majoritarian tyrannies may display similar autophagic tendencies.

Bounded vs. diffuse tyrannies

Variance in the sharpness of group boundaries and tyrannical tools produces variance in majoritarian tyrannies. Some only hurt the minorities they select for tyrannical treatment, while others hurt themselves in the process, too. In a simple, binary manner, we can speak of ‘bounded’ tyrannies in which majorities tyrannize an insulated minority in surgical ways, so that they can reap all the fruits of tyranny and avoid all its burdens. By contrast, we can speak of ‘diffuse,’ self-damaging tyrannies when majorities tyrannize minority groups whose boundaries are open and fluid, or when their policies fail to reliably discriminate between minority and majority victims.

Debates on majoritarian tyrannies commonly assume them to be bounded. In the real word, pure examples are hard to come by. In most cases, majoritarian tyrannies carry significant risks of harming their authors, at least in a partial, indirect, or long-term manner. Rather than empirical categories, ‘bounded’ majoritarian tyrannies appear to be Weberian ideal types that possess only imperfect empirical referents. Diffuse majoritarian tyrannies seem to be the empirical norm, bounded tyrannies the exception.

Tyrannical agency

Quite obviously, for a majoritarian group to tyrannize a minority, it must be able to act as a tyrant. That is to say, it must be able to act. It is not sufficient just to be a majority and to recognize itself as such. Its members must develop joint preferences, and they must coordinate and constitute themselves as a collective actor. If ‘the issue of collective tyranny needs reconsideration’ (Nyirkos 2018, 51), it is, above all, the capacity of collective action by malevolent majorities that needs reconsideration. It is neither satisfactory to evoke the metaphor of the tyrant (which ignores problems of collective action) nor to invoke the truism that ‘the people do not rule’ in representative democracies (which discards the possibility of tyrannical collective behaviour by majorities). Even if democratic decision-making authority rests in few hands, citizens are not entirely powerless. Instead of either overlooking the problem of collective action or denying its possibility, we need to consider collective agency as spanning a continuum. It is not an all-or-nothing affair. Neither ‘the people’ nor ‘the majority’ need to ‘rule’ or govern’ in order to act in tyrannical ways.

Minimal agency

Social groups, even if they possess strong collective identities and widely recognized demarcation lines towards others, are no actors. For majorities to build themselves into tyrants looming over their minoritarian co-citizens, they need to overcome the problems of coordination that are endemic to all social groups that wish to enter the political arena. First of all, though, their members need to develop and discover the ideas and interests that bind them together. They cannot be said to act as tyrants if others dictate their preferences. They can only do so under conditions of ‘free will,’ that is, under conditions of liberty that allow them to form and express their preferences autonomously. Otherwise, they are subjects of power who want what their masters want, rather than tyrannical agents. They are puppets, rather than puppeteers.

As Robert Dahl stipulated in the opening pages of his seminal Polyarchy, for democracy to exist, citizens must enjoy ‘unimpaired opportunities’ to ‘formulate their preferences’ and to ‘signify their preferences to their fellow citizens and the government’ (1971, 2). In analogous fashion, for majoritarian tyranny to arise, citizens must enjoy at least minimal opportunities to formulate and communicate their preferences. Arguably, these minimal conditions are only met in minimally democratic regimes. Authoritarian regimes inhibit both individual and collective agency. They distort and suppress the formation of individual as well as collective preferences; and they distort and suppress individual as well as collective action.³⁶ Accordingly, majorities cannot act in genuine tyrannies—neither as tyrants nor as non-tyrants. It is only the conceptual reification of majorities as pre-political, pre-established unitary actors that creates the illusion of them being able to act as sovereign rulers even under conditions of dictatorship (through authoritarian elites who present themselves as their faithful representatives).

Surely, majorities may actively or passively support the oppression of minorities in authoritarian regimes. We may condemn such majoritarian backing of tyranny on moral grounds, but we should not confuse it with majoritarian tyranny. Under authoritarian conditions, the pro-regime preferences of the popular majority are likely to be heteronomous, induced by the regime itself; the same applies to its actions, which are often driven by fear. Besides, under the conditions of opacity that reign in authoritarian regimes, we do not possess reliable information on either majoritarian preferences or majoritarian actions. What do majorities want and what do they do under dictatorship? To what extent do they support the regime, and to what extent do they collaborate in its repression of minorities? We usually do not know, except in episodic, unsystematic ways (see, e.g. Ahram and Goode 2016).

Tyrannies of majorities therefore can only emerge in democracies. In a tyrannical regime, there is no such thing as majority rule and thus no such thing as a ‘tyranny of the majority.’ Autocracies are systems of minority rule. Autocrats may rule in a majority’s name, but majorities never rule themselves under authoritarianism, nor do they even act. Out of fear or conviction, a majority of subjects under dictatorship may be complicit in the active, everyday reproduction of their own oppression (see, e.g. Havel 1985 and Wedeen 1998). Yet, conceiving them as collective agents of domination misreads factual relations of power.

Debates about ‘majoritarian tyranny’ in authoritarian regimes thus rest on false attributions of collective agency. For instance, ‘when you have elections without liberty,’ you do not ‘end up with a tyranny of the majority,’ as Thomas Friedman warns (citing Michael Mandelbaum),³⁷ but with a tyranny of the minority who self-empowered itself through unfree elections. Similarly, if a dictatorship fails to be egalitarian in its oppression and singles out a religious minority for discriminatory treatment, it does not exercise ‘religious majoritarianism’ (el-Gaili 2004, 531) but uses religious appeals for authoritarian elite rule. The former situation may be classified as an instance of ‘electoral authoritarianism’ (Schedler 2013), the latter as one of ‘ideological dictatorship’ (Fritze 2008). Both deny majorities the requisite agency for subjecting minorities to tyrannical governance.

Graded agency

Although it seems clear that majorities cannot act under dictatorship, it is not at all clear whether and to what extent they can do so under democracy. In his careful and lucid incursion into the debate on majoritarian tyranny, Dahl (1956) concluded that the relative powerlessness of majorities in day-to-day governance of modern representative democracies renders the idea essentially phantasmagorical: ‘If majorities in a democracy nearly always govern in the broad meaning of the term, they rarely rule … majority rule is mostly a myth [and therefore] majority tyranny is mostly a myth too. For if the majority cannot rule, surely it cannot be tyrannical’ (133).

No doubt, citizens do not govern in representative democracies, nor do permanent or transient majorities. Modern democracies are systems of domination whose subjects enjoy (as citizens) a broad set of powers that allows them, in theory if not always in practice, to hold rulers accountable. It does not allow them to rule. However, the fact that majorities do not hold cabinet positions or pass bills in legislative assemblies, does not deprive them of all agency and responsibility. Political agency spans a wide continuum. The space between omnipotence and impotence is far from empty. The fact that majorities are not the most powerful agent in the everyday operation of a system does not mean they have no power at all. They do not run the government, but they can still perform a broad range of roles that allow them to ‘tyrannize’ minorities. Along the continuum of political agency, in descending order of active participation and collective power, majorities can tyrannize minority groups in at least three broad ways: by (1) decision, (2) authorization, and (3) complicity.³⁸

Majoritarian decision

Majorities usually do not decide upon specific issues, but in referenda, they do. In certain referenda, citizens are called upon to decide—by simple majority votes— issues that affect the vital interests or even the civil rights of distinct minority groups. Subjecting minority rights to direct majoritarian decision-making invariably raises the spectre of majoritarian tyranny. In the US, state-level referenda on the acceptance of same-sex marriage, bans on affirmative action, and the codification of English as official language have accordingly been analyzed as potential instances of majoritarian tyranny (see Lewis 2013).

Majoritarian authorization

In representative democracies, the central role of citizens is their role as voters. In that capacity, they cannot enact tyrannical policies, but they can authorize them. They can grant their authorization ex ante, when they support candidates who campaign on anti-minoritarian platforms. Or they can sanction them ex post, when they vote for elected officials who carried out tyrannical anti-minoritarian policies during their term in office. Voters who supported Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections exemplify the former possibility; those who remained loyal to prime minister Viktor Orbán in the 2014 Hungarian parliamentary elections, after he had used his 2010 victory to steer the country towards exclusionary, illiberal governance, exemplify the latter.

Majoritarian complicity

Majoritarian complicity comprises a broad range of loosely coordinated actions and inactions. It may demand active engagement or mere passivity and unfold in covert or public fashion, with or without formal backing. While weak actors often resort to hidden ‘everyday forms of resistance’ (Scott 1985), members of dominant groups often engage in open ‘everyday forms of oppression,’ including verbal or physical aggression. Their disciplining, exclusionary impetus need not be codified in law. A ‘social tyranny’ (Mill [1859] 1974, 63) may be entirely informal, even illegal. Oftentimes, though, tyrannical mores and discriminatory laws are neatly aligned, nourishing and sustaining each other. The historical interplay between repressive laws against homosexuality and its social condemnation in the name of God and nature, as in postwar Britain, exemplifies the mutual reinforcement of legal and social tyranny (see, e.g. Smith, Bartlett, and King 2004). A contemporary example of passive majoritarian complicity embedded in law is the silent acquiescence which most US citizens have given to the institutionalized injustice of their country’s ethnically distorted system of mass incarceration (see, e.g. Alexander 2012).

Oppression of minorities by complicit majorities inevitably raises questions about the extent and the motives of participation by individual members of the majority group in ‘helping to commit a crime or do wrong.’³⁹ How widespread is participation by majority members? How deep or shallow is it? How voluntary or coerced? To what extent do aggressions against outside groups meet with resistance from within the majority? We may suspect that majoritarian tyrannies often work like tyrannical matryoshka dolls. In the first layer, majorities tyrannize minorities inside nations; in the second layer, majorities tyrannize minorities inside majority groups.⁴⁰

Abdication

In democracies, majorities of citizens have the power to tyrannize their fellow citizens. They also have the power to renounce that power. In extreme cases of diffuse or self-damaging TM, majorities consent to the destruction of democracy in their own name. Their tyranny over the losers of democratic elections leads to the end of democratic elections. We have seen such processes of majoritarian abdication unfold in contemporary cases of gradual democratic subversion by elected governments (see, e.g. Bermeo 2016; Diamond 2015; Waldner and Lust 2018).

Unlike military coups or executive takeovers, incremental processes of democratic subversion do not offer clear points of rupture. Rolled out in stepwise and opaque ways, they do not involve a single dramatic event that marks the breakdown of democracy and the inauguration of authoritarianism. As illiberal governments maintain the outward appearance of democratic institutional continuity, they provoke endemic controversy about how far they have travelled on the road from electoral democracy to electoral authoritarianism, whether they have already crossed the threshold between them, and if so, when exactly.

Controversy about the exact moment of regime change implies controversy over the exact role of citizens. Once and again, we have seen majorities (or at least pluralities) of voters supporting governments who have been, step by step, dismantling their democratic rights and liberties.⁴¹ But what were the precise points of majoritarian abdication? Which elections were the last minimally democratic ones in which voters still had a significant say and could have ‘thrown out the rascals’? At what point did the tyrannical majority cede its powers to the tyrannical minority that now rules in its name? Inevitably, conceiving processes of democratic subversion as processes of ‘majoritarian abdication’ turns debates about regime change into debates about citizen agency and responsibility for regime change.

Varieties of tyrannies

Given the concept’s inherent potential for polemical exaggeration, debates about TM have commonly revolved around the normative task of delimiting the variety of policies that can legitimately be described as tyrannical acts. By comparison, its other two constitutive dimensions—the degree of agency of tyrannical majorities and the degree of boundedness of majoritarian tyrannies—have received far less attention, if any at all. If we combine these two, we obtain six configurations of majoritarian tyranny. Table 1 maps these configurations and lists some rather self-explanatory empirical examples.

Table 1. Varieties of majoritarian tyranny (with examples).

	Decision	Authorization	Complicity
Bounded tyrannies	A. Tyranny of decisive majorities	B. Tyranny of consenting majorities	C. Tyranny of silent majorities
	Referenda on same-sex marriage in US states	Hungarian 2014 and 2018 parliamentary elections (reelection of Viktor Orbán)	US system of mass incarceration of ethnic minorities
Diffuse tyrannies	D. Self-damaging tyranny of decisive majorities	E. Self-damaging tyranny of consenting majorities	F. Self-damaging tyranny of silent majorities
	UK 2016 referendum on EU membership (‘Brexit’)	2016 Philippine presidential election (Rodrigo Duterte)	Citizen acquiescence to private and public criminal violence in Mexican drug war

The table includes three instances of ‘bounded’ majoritarian tyranny: the decisive majorities that defeat same-sex marriage in popular referenda (cell A), the consenting plurality of Hungarian voters who validated Viktor Orbán’s exclusionary nationalism in the 2014 and 2018 parliamentary elections (cell B),⁴² and the complicit majority of US citizens who acquiesce to the legal tyranny of ethnic mass incarceration in their country (cell C). It also lists three examples of ‘diffuse’ majoritarian tyranny: the slim majority of UK citizens who in 2016 decided to leave the European Union (cell D), the plurality of voters who authorized Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign of extrajudicial executions against suspected drug criminals in the 2016 Philippine presidential election (cell E),⁴³ and the majority of Mexican citizens who acquiesce to organized criminal violence by private and state actors within the so-called drug war (cell F).⁴⁴

Ambiguous accountability

In modern democracies, we often ironize, the people have come to occupy the place of God. Popular sovereignty has replaced almighty divinity. Well, it hasn’t. While God’s infallibility leaves us with intricate problems of theodicy (how it is that a just God permits an unjust world), the people’s fallibility leaves us with the possibility of calling it to account in the public space. God may answer our prayers, but not our critical questions. The demos, by contrast, can be subject to tough questioning about the injustices it inflicts on its members. Democracy, we often posit, involves accountability.⁴⁵ In democracies, citizens hold governments accountable. But who holds citizens accountable? Unless we conceive the demos as ‘unaccountable,’ as in ancient Athens (Landauer 2019), the answer is obvious: citizens themselves. In the absence of superior instances, there is no one else who could do the job.

In a democracy, the demos holds the ‘the ultimate controlling power’ (Mill [1861] 1991, 97) over political decisions. Dissenting democratic citizens accept its power, but they need not accept it unquestioningly. Once a majority has taken its decision, the minority is obligated to comply with it, but under no obligation to accept its wisdom. Power comes with responsibility, and so does the power of the demos. Democracy is not just a system of vertical domination, but a system of horizontal relations among free and equal citizens ‘sharing the job of making political decisions’ (Beerbohm 2012, 28). It involves mutual responsibility among citizens and thus demands mutual accountability among them.⁴⁶

Arguably, public debates about ‘majoritarian tyranny’ constitute such exercises of ‘horizontal accountability’ among citizens.⁴⁷ Accountability involves answerability (Schedler 1999). It involves the obligation to respond to tough questions. When minorities raise public alerts about their ‘tyrannical’ mistreatment, they ask their majoritarian fellow citizens to answer uncomfortable questions about the harmful consequences their decisions impose on others, their ensuing collective responsibilities in harming others, and the costs they unwillingly impose on themselves. Thus, despite its history of serving as an antidemocratic instrument for discrediting or disempowering democratic majorities, I propose to value it an antipopulist instrument for holding democratic majorities accountable. While populism portrays ‘the people’ as a virtuous and undivided community subject to elite abuse (see, e.g. Mudde 2007, 23; Müller 2017), the vocabulary of majoritarian tyranny accepts the internal pluralism of the demos as well as the possibility that citizens themselves may act as agents of injustice.

At times, democrats treat majoritarian decisions as points of authoritative closure of public debate. Shut up, they say, in manners more or less elegant, the majority has spoken; we need to bow in silence to the popular will. As G. E. M. Anscombe noted once, in the United Kingdom, the heartland of majoritarian democracy, ‘it is not astonishing to hear of an apparently reasonable and well-disposed man who says: someone who is not prepared to accept a majority decision, or a law enacted by democratic processes [regardless of its content], ought to leave the society’ (1976, 162, emphasis removed). Against the insistence on the final nature of majority decisions, complaints about ‘majoritarian tyranny’ strive to prevent the closure of public debate.

Through denunciations of ‘majoritarian tyranny,’ the losers of democratic politics call upon its winners to reopen democratic deliberation and reconsider injurious collective decisions by appealing to the limits of legitimate democratic decisions. What are these limits? Debates on ‘majoritarian tyrannies’ do not provide an answer. Their role is to raise the question. They serve the vital democratic purpose of tracing and policing the bounds of legitimate democratic politics. Democracy’s constraints are neither self-evident nor self-enforcing. They demand vigorous public debate. Arguably, since the invention of democracy, the idea of majoritarian tyrannies has been serving as a conceptual vehicle to engage democratic majorities in such debate.

Ideally, then, claims of TM work as instruments of mutual accountability among citizens. They introduce productive provocations into public debate that force democratic majorities to justify and revise their political decisions. However, given its metaphorical grounding in the notion of personal dictatorship, the concept of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ constitutes a deeply ambiguous tool of citizen accountability. It involves, in fact, two serious obstacles to majoritarian answerability: its polemical surplus risks intoxicating political debate, while its simplifying assumptions risk trivializing it.

The dangers of demonization

Through their polemical redescription of democratic governance as ‘tyrannical,’ claims of TM are bound to provoke defensive reactions by those they criticize and they are meant to do so. Their polemical surplus may serve minorities as a valuable rhetorical resource for drawing attention to their plight. But it also contains rhetorical pitfalls that risk derailing its critical intentions.

The reality gap: Due to their polemical nature, accusations of TM invariably carry an air of hyperbole. Even when minorities denounce serious rather than petty offenses, majorities may easily dismiss their charges as palpably inaccurate, as ‘mere political theatre’ without empirical substance. Of course, the critical examination of claims and intentions is inherent to political discourse. In politics as well as in ordinary life, exaggeration provokes corrective criticism, overdramatization breeds perceptions of unseriousness, and overdrawn claims of behavioural abuse invite charges of rhetorical abuse. The ‘conceptual stretching’ that is inherent in talk about tyrannies by democratic majorities renders all these forms of criticism endemic. The suspicions of insincerity that have haunted the concept since its invention may well be a side effect of its polemical surplus.

The assumption of bad faith: In addition to their structural exaggeration, denunciations of democratic majorities as ‘tyrannical’ carry an assumption of bad faith. When a democratic majority commits injustices against minorities out of mistake or when it pursues a conception of the common good that minorities reject, it is inappropriate to describe its actions as ‘tyrannical.’ Errors from incompetence or ignorance may produce great harm, but they are not exercises of tyranny, and the same applies to differences in political judgment (see also Waldron 1993). By definition, tyrannical majorities do not pursue the public good, but their own, and they do so with either indifference or hostility towards the minorities they exploit or oppress. Regardless of their empirical accuracy, such implicit claims of bad faith are prone to be self-fulfilling. Just as trust breeds trustworthiness (Mansbridge 1999), distrust nurtures breaches of trust.

The assumption of authoritarianism: Democracy, we all know, requires mutual toleration of conflicting ideas and interests. Competing social groups and political contenders must not treat each other as enemies to be expulsed from the political arena but as adversaries who are to be confronted within the rules of the democratic game. Even in peaceful democratic competition, however, ‘[t]he category of the ‘enemy’ does not disappear but is displaced … to those who do not accept the democratic ‘rules of the game’ and who thereby exclude themselves from the political community.’ (Mouffe 1993, 14). In its literal sense, the notion of TM designates majorities as such enemies of democracy, as they do not act in democratic but despotic ways! Furthermore, since democratic commitments are reciprocal, the implicit message is one of potential disobedience: ‘as you do not play by the rules, we may not do either.’ By accusing the majority of acting in tyrannical ways, the minority denies its legitimacy and affirms its own right to rebellion.

Overall, with its polemical surplus, its attribution of bad faith, and its charge of authoritarianism, the notion of majoritarian tyranny contains a toxic mix of contentious elements. For majoritarian actors to listen and respond in constructive, rather than dismissive, ways, they need to be generous and forgiving. Instead of retaliating, they need to practice self-restraining ‘enlightened reciprocity’ (Schedler 2021, 261–263). They need to accept a good dose of overdramatization, overlook the attribution of ill intentions, and ignore their portrayal as enemies of democracy. Quite ironically, charges of majoritarian tyranny can generate effective public accountability only if the majority acts in non-tyrannical ways and embraces deliberative virtues which these charges themselves deny.

The dangers of simplification

The ‘tyranny of the majority’ is not just a deeply polemical but a radically simplifying concept. Its animating metaphor of the personal tyrant suggests a clarity and simplicity in the relationship between majorities and minorities which are unattainable in the real world. Instead of the classic image of M, the tyrant, oppressing m, the victim, my conceptual reconstruction yielded a complex configuration of majoritarian tyrannies which involve more or less tyrannical acts by more or less decisive majorities who are more or less able to insulate themselves from the injustices they commit. If aggrieved minorities recognize this empirical complexity, their accusations of TM can enrich political debate and pull majorities out of their comfort zone into public exercises of critical self-examination. By contrast, if they yield to the simplifying power of the metaphor, they risk impoverishing political debate and harden group conflicts.

If those who denounce ‘majoritarian tyrannies’ treat tyrannical behaviour as a well-contained, self-evident class of acts, ignoring its contentious and open nature, they are likely to engage in sterile denunciation and neglect the task that may render their claims convincing: cogent argumentation. If they reify majorities and minorities as fixed, pre-established, and neatly separated groups, ignoring their overlaps, their fluidity, and their interdependence, they are likely to reinforce the tyrannical behaviour of the majority, rather than moderating it through a mutual recognition of common bonds. Finally, if they imagine the power of democratic majorities to be an all-or-nothing affair, ignoring the wide range of active roles their members may play, they will either put excessive blame on majorities or absolve them from all guilt. Such a dichotomous frame of mind is unlikely to stimulate serious debates on the nature and degree of responsibility that their majoritarian fellow citizens hold in the production of political injustice.

Conclusion

While it has been perennially suspicious of serving as an antidemocratic stratagem, I proposed to revalue the concept of majoritarian tyranny as an antipopulist tool of horizontal accountability among citizens. Rejecting both the homogeneity and the innate virtuousness of ‘the people,’ it serves aggrieved minorities to call their majoritarian fellow citizens to account for the injuries they produce or enable. It permits them to open public debates on the legitimate restraints on the power of democratic majorities.

Comprehending the notion of TM as an instrument of citizen accountability runs against its conventional conception as a theory of democracy. When minorities challenge the ‘tyrannical’ conduct of the democratic majority in turn, they neither articulate a general critique of democracy nor a general critique of ordinary people. Rather than branding their majoritarian fellow citizens as timeless carriers of injustice, they denounce concrete majoritarian actions or omissions as unjust. Such exercises of democratic accountability concern the nature of specific policies, not the nature of the polity or the political community.

Though I revalue TM as a rhetorical resource of demos accountability, I also introduce strong caveats. As a metaphorical concept, built after the image of personal tyranny, it carries troubling connotations that risk reinforcing the asymmetric conflict between majorities and minorities, rather than opening it up to constructive debate. Given their polemical nature, accusations of majoritarian tyranny can easily end in sterile monologues of the deaf, rather than inducing effective, deliberative exercises of accountability. And given the simplifying force of their animating metaphor of the lonely tyrant, such accusations can easily reify the relations between majorities and minorities, rather than encouraging their mutual reconsideration. The weight of the metaphor threatens to blind minorities to the complexities of real-existing majoritarian tyrannies. It tempts them to forsake the argumentative efforts needed to engage oppressive majorities in constructive debate.

Overall, given the democratic ambiguities of its metaphorical roots, the notion of ‘majoritarian tyranny’ can serve as a productive tool of citizen accountability only if both sides accept to downplay its literal, that is, metaphorical, meaning. Majorities need some tolerance of hyperbolic dramatization and the magnanimity to overlook the insult implied in charges of self-serving authoritarianism. Minorities, on their part, need to be attentive to the normative subtleties and empirical complexities of majoritarian actions and responsibilities, if they wish to challenge them in fruitful ways that do not perpetuate the oppression they suffer but open it up to genuine debate.

Acknowledgements

I presented drafts of this article at the School of Governance, Technical University Munich, the Institute of Political Science, Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, and the Department of Political Studies, cide, Mexico City. I thank all participants for their most valuable feedback and Claudio López-Guerra for his incisive encouragement. An early version appeared in December 2019 as ‘Tyrannies of Majorities: A Conceptual Reassessment,’ Working Paper 433, Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame. I am much indebted to the constructive criticism by the three anonymous reviewers of Political Research Exchange.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Fred Argy, ‘Beware Tyranny of the Majority,’ Australian Financial Review, 3 April 1996.

2 For a splendid historical review of these debates, see Nyirkos (2018).

3 Among many others, see Crouch (2004), Mouffe (1993), and Nyirkos (2018, Ch. 9).

4 See, e.g., Galston (2018), Mounk (2018), Slater (2013), and Urbinati (2019).

5 For example, see Democratic Audit uk, ‘Thanks to the referendum, the tyranny of the majority has prevailed,’ 2 August 2016 (http://www.democraticaudit.com/2016/08/02/thanks-to-the-referendum-the-tyranny-of-the-majority-has-prevailed/), and Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, ‘When More Democracy Isn’t More Democratic,’ New York Times, 21 January 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/world/europe/democracy-brexit-populism.html), both accessed 24 August 2021.

6 See, e.g., Paul Thornton, ‘Readers React: 'Gay marriage, Courts, and the ‘Tyranny of the Majority’,’ Los Angeles Times, 10 October 2014 (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-le-1011-gay-marriage-lettersonletters-20141011-story.html), accessed 25 August 2021.

7 In Egypt, claims of majoritarian tyranny served to justify the 2013 military coup against elected president Mohamed Morsi. See, e.g., Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift, ‘Egypt’s Tyranny of the Majority,’ Washington-Merry-Go-Round, 3 July 2013 (http://washingtonmerrygoround.com/egypts-tyranny-of-the-majority/), accessed 24 August 2021.

8 See, e.g., Mathew Markman, ‘Tyranny of the Majority in Turkey,’ Huffington Post, 9 August 2013 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mathew-markman/tyranny-of-the-majority-i_b_3411794.html), and Anne Applebaum, ‘Hungary Faces Tyranny of the Majority,’ National Post, 3 January 2011 (https://nationalpost.com/full-comment/anne-applebaum-hungary-faces-tyranny-of-the-majority?r), both accessed 24 August 2021; and Pap (2018, 56).

9 For a dissenting view, see López-Guerra (2014, Ch. 6.2).

10 Cited in Nyirkos (2018, 22 and 23).

11 Federalist Paper No. 47.

12 Nyirkos (2018, 1) attributes its first use to John Adams in his A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1788).

13 One synthetic locus classicus is Dahl (1971, 1–4).

14 ‘Tyranny,’ Oxford Dictionary of English, ed. Angus Stevenson (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010, 3rd ed.).

15 ‘Tyranny,’ Oxford English Dictionary (www.oed.com).

16 Andrew Reeve, ‘Tyranny,’ The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics, ed. Ian McLean and Alistair McMillan (Oxford, uk: Oxford University Press, 2009).

17 With its practices of rather spontaneous, majoritarian voting by non-deliberative crowds, the ‘democracy’ of the ancients was more easily compatible with the orator-induced tyranny of irreflexive, volatile majorities.

18 Matthew Landauer views classic depictions of tyrannical people (as a whole) in a similar manner: ‘Greek literature, from history to philosophy and drama, frequently analogized the demos to a tyrant. But such texts [were] operating at the level of metaphor … with polemical intent’ (2019, 10). Yet, in ancient Greece, he argues, ‘the demos-tyrant metaphor’ (13) carried a kernel of truth: the freedom from accountability of both tyrants and demoi (2019, Ch. 1). In his perspective, the metaphor served to underline the unaccountable status of the demos. In my perspective, it has served to undermine it.

19 In an exploratory exercise previous to this paper, I searched the LexisNexis Academic database of newspaper stories to identify varieties of common usage of the term. I will be citing some illustrative examples throughout the present section. Scope of search: US and world news. Sources: newspapers. Search term: tyranny of the majority. Date of last search: 10 January 2019. Number of selected articles: 1568 (https://academic.lexisnexis.eu/). None of my quotes from the LexisNexis dataset includes weblinks. All are imbedded in footnotes.

20 ‘Chapter XV: Unlimited power of the majority in the United States, and its consequences’ (Tocqueville [1835] 2000).

21 Federalist Paper No. 51. On democracy and injustice, see, e.g., Dowding, Goodin, and Pateman (2004).

22 In ‘competitive’ or ‘electoral’ autocracies, ruling minorities may deploy a wide ‘repertoire of institutional manipulation’ to keep majorities at bay (see Levitsky and Way 2010; Schedler 2013 and Birch 2011). Democratic majorities may select items from the same repertoire to keep minorities at bay.

23 In US political and academic debate, referenda on same-sex marriage have turned into a paradigm of (potential) majoritarian tyranny. See, for example, Cox (2013), Lewis (2013), and Stone (2016).

24 In the words of one commentator, the French debate about the banning of head scarfs sets ‘freedom of religious expression versus the tyranny of the majority.’ (Ivi Szaboova-Baxendale, ‘Minorities Must Be Protected,’ The Gloucester Citizen [UK], 25 February 2004).

25 Thomas W. Bechtler, ‘The Dangers of Majority Tyranny,’ open Democracy, 2 March 2010 (https://www.opendemocracy.net/thomas-w-bechtler/danger-of-majority-tyranny), accessed 24 August 2021.

26 Beatriz Gietner, ‘With Students Like This, Who Needs the Nanny State?,’ The Times (London), 30 October 2018

27 The least demanding, and most controversial, versions of such claims of substantive unfairness cover all redistributive measures that affect (usually affluent) minorities (Fleck and Hanssen 2013: 305). From this perspective, the poor are not entitled to tax the rich since any form of redistributive policy appears tyrannical.

28 Of course, the same question can be raised in situations of polarization, when opposing camps of roughly equal size are passionate about policy alternatives, as in the UK Brexit referendum.

29 I am paraphrasing Timur Kuran’s ‘preference falsification’ (1995).

30 National ‘legislation based on a poll showing 60 percent of Canadians support gun control may be described as tyranny of the majority and certainly not democracy’ (H. Rae Grinnell, ‘Tyranny of the Majority,’ The Ottawa Citizen, 11 April 1995).

31 On permissions to carry guns on US college campuses, ‘[a fellow letter-writer] states: regardless of what the majority of students, faculty, staff, regents or voters think ‘the right for concealed carry permit holders to bring guns onto university campuses should be protected from the tyranny of the majority’.’ (Alan Cipriani, ‘More Guns on Campus Not the Answer,’ Daily Camera [Boulder, Colorado], 24 June 2014).

32 ‘The fox hunting debate has led to society in England and Wales becoming deeply divided, and the prediction that there will be civil disobedience on a massive scale is supported by political theorists, one of whom sums up ‘tyranny of the majority’ succinctly and eloquently in the following terms: ‘In deeply divided societies …, majority rule spells majority dictatorship and civil strife rather than democracy’’ Arfon Jones, ‘Your Letters: Ask the People,’ Daily Post [North Wales], 21 December 2004.

33 Mike Large, ‘PTP Doesn't Result in a True Democracy,’ Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia), 28 November 2018.

34 ‘Tyranny of the Majority in J&K [Jammu and Kashmir], Jammu Victimized,’ Early Times (India), 23 May 2011.

35 On basic strategies of ethnic boundary management, see Wimmer (2008).

36 Two classic texts on ‘preference falsification’ under authoritarianism are Havel (1985) and Kuran (1995).

37 Thomas L. Friedman, ‘What’s Missing in Bagdad,’ New York Times, 7 September 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/opinion/09friedmancolumn.html) (accessed 24 August 2021).

38 In a similar fashion, Beerbohm locates the political agency of individual citizens under representative democracy on a continuum of the roles that they play, from ‘coprincipals’ to mere ‘accessories’ of collective decisions (2012: Ch. 9).

39 ‘Complicit,’ Merriam-Webster Dictionary (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/complicit), accessed 15 August 2021.

40 Such dynamics may also take place at subnational level. Acting in the name of regional majorities (who constitute national minorities), armed secessionist groups may subject internal dissident minorities to violent control. On such practices of constituency control by the ETA in the Basque country and the IRA in Northern Ireland, see De la Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca (2006).

41 For summaries and explanatory explorations, see Foa and Mounk (2017), Martínez (2021), Svolik (2020), and Yildiz (2017).

42 Externally, Viktor Orbán’s ethnic nationalism targets potential immigrants. Domestically, it targets the Roma minority, though in a more subtle and indirect manner (see, e.g., Tremlett and Messing 2015).

43 See, e.g., Thompson (2016).

44 See, e.g., Olson (2012) and Schedler (2018).

45 See, e.g., Diamond and Morlino (2004), Rosanvallon (2008), Schmitter and Karl (1991).

46 Beerbohm describes democracy in very similar terms as ‘a system of shared liability’ (2012).

47 The notion of ‘horizontal accountability’ was introduced by O’Donnell (1994) as a rough synonym for constitutional checks and balances between branches of the state. Here, I am extending it from the realm of the state to the realm of civil society.