When the People Vote to Be Ruled

Majoritarianism is regarded as peak democracy, but what happens when it undermines it altogether?

In my last post, I wrote about democracy in Mexico and how voters delivered to Morena an overwhelming victory that gives the far-left party a wide enough margin in the federal legislature to bypass opposition and pass major constitutional changes that curb checks on central power. This got me thinking about a major dilemma among centralized democracies: what happens when the people vote to be ruled?

Our current political climate has featured leaders with authoritarian tendencies who consolidate power, often with direct or indirect public approval. Notable examples include Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and Viktor Orban in Hungary, but Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey stands out. Erdogan has been at the forefront of Turkish politics since 2003 and has significantly eroded liberalism in the country through measures like cracking down on journalists and protesters and bringing the judiciary under executive control.

In 2016, after a failed coup attempt by the Turkish military, Erdogan purged the military, judiciary, and civil service. He also advocated for constitutional amendments, arguing that these changes would streamline government functions and make the executive more effective by bypassing bureaucratic obstacles and special interests. These reforms replaced the parliamentary system with a presidential one, allowing the president to issue decrees, prepare the budget, and dissolve parliament under certain conditions. The role of prime minister was eliminated, and the ruling party's ability to oversee the president's policies was reduced. These changes passed the legislature and were approved by the public in a narrow national referendum, with 51.4% voting in favor. Had they not passed, one can imagine there could be still a substantial share of the public either supportive of or ambivalent to a larger role for the president — if not Erdogan, then a potential successor.

All of this reminded me of a study from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 that’s still on my mind. The researchers studied why voters sometimes support power grabs by elected officials that undermine democratic norms. The researchers found that many voters, called majoritarians, view actions by elected leaders as inherently democratic, even when they erode democratic institutions. In one experiment, respondents were more likely to support a judicial appointment by an outgoing governor if the governor was a co-partisan, and they were more likely to see the appointment as democratic, by 22 percentage points and 18 percentage points, respectively.

In another survey, respondents evaluated a scenario where a governor proposed a ballot initiative to gain unilateral control over the state budget. The justification of limiting special interests' influence was found to be particularly persuasive. Respondents were more likely to support the governor's proposal when it involved limiting special interests compared to other justifications. Majoritarian attitudes, rather than just partisan loyalty, pose a significant threat to liberal democracy in the United States, the study finds. This challenges the assumption that majoritarianism is synonymous with liberal democracy, highlighting the potential dangers of prioritizing majority rule over minority rights.

The study organizes respondents into a typology. Organized into a Punnett square, the respondents are broken down into whether they support, oppose, or conditionally support or oppose power grabs, and whether they view power grabs as democratic or anti-democratic. Both majoritarians and autocrats support power grabs, the difference being the latter believe them to be anti-democratic. Conversely, both anti-majoritarians and small-d democrats oppose power grabs, though the former view them as democratic and the latter as anti-democratic. Rationalizers facially oppose power grabs but, when push comes to shove, justify them only for co-partisans, whereas partisans explicitly only support power grabs for co-partisans while only referring to power grabs by political rivals as anti-democratic. Militants support power grabs and recognize them as anti-democratic.

I do have my issues with the study, despite it confirming my priors. First, I think it’s debatable whether an outgoing governor appointing a judge is the pinnacle example of executive-initiated democratic erosion, but at the very least could be regarded as the breaking of a norm. Second, the sample is more educated and “whiter” compared to the general U.S. population. Third, hypothetical scenarios don't fully capture the complexity of real-world political dynamics. Voter attitudes can be influenced by numerous factors beyond an outgoing governor's judicial appointment, so caution ought to be exercised in making causal inferences between voter attitudes and support for power grabs. Additionally, these survey examples focus on state-level scenarios, not federal ones. This difference means we can't draw practically applicable insights from them, but only a general sense of how people might respond to such power grabs. Finally, there are a variety of other ways elected leaders can exercise ostensibly legal and high-impact power that isn’t as blunt as the survey examples and that may fly under the radar of news media. It’s also possible that additional inquiry may conclude paradoxical responses from survey participants.

That said, we do see real world examples of voters electing leaders who undermine democratic institutions. I’d posit that most are not doing to out of a distaste for democracy, but out of resort to short-to-medium term individual or collective interests (immigration being a prime example). The trouble is that when more of the people’s interests are consolidated in fewer places, voters are left with fewer options even in multi-party systems. Consolidated systems beget authoritarian officials from which the public winds up having to choose between.

As far as the issue of democracy goes, the divides are not cleanly ideological, left to right. It’s more between centralists and decentralists, between people committed to institutions and democratic norms that disperse power versus those committed to critiquing and eliminating institutions and norms that impede power. Anti-majoritarians and liberal small-d democrats in one camp and majoritarians, rationalizers, and partisans in another. In each there are populists and elites, liberals and conservatives, moderates and radicals. As bruising as the conditional support for democratic norms has been, and the conditional support American democracy continues to have based on outcomes, it is examples like that in Turkey that serve as a cautionary tale for unconditional national majoritarianism in practice and as a premise for how to construct a pluralist democracy.

Many of the most fervent majoritarians in the discourse are in academia and media, and one thing we’ve learned over the last decade amid our so-called cultural revolution is not to underestimate the potential of ideas originating in insular intellectual laboratories to proliferate into the mainstream, including the tyrannies that Thomas Paine wrote 'are always perpetrated in the name of the noblest causes.'

That Patchwork is a first-of-its-kind newsletter about democracy, economics and culture from a decentralist angle. Today, fewer people are seeking more power over American life. To preserve a pluralist democracy will mean challenging the entrenched premise that observations, ideas and solutions are best made with a federal or national interest.

Subscribe below and get a subscription for just $3/month for an entire year.

Beyond That Patchwork

This week, I’m listening to Lowell Fulson’s 1970 album "Hung Down Head” for the billionth time. This album is such a vibe. I can’t get enough of it and it makes me appreciate and re-appreciate what West Coast Blues brings to the genre. What you get is the polish of jazz with the emotion of blues vocals — and even when there are no vocals, like in “Low Society”, the music speaks in its place. I think this is the one I want played at my funeral.