Minority/Majority

More than Numbers

The minority/majority relationship is often presented as a matter of numeric difference. Majorities outnumber minorities. For example, the leader of the political party with the most seats in the United States Senate is known as the Majority Leader; in contrast, the leader of the second-largest party is designated the Minority Leader. Indeed, at its most general, a minority can be any group of people (political party, club, family, etc.) that can be distinguished from the rest of society in some way (opinions, beliefs, associations, behavior, etc.). Thus, by counting the number of respondents on any given issue—the invasion of Iraq, political parties or candidates, or the latest movie releases from Hollywood—it is possible to identify both a majority and a minority. In this rendering, majority and minority are not so much competing interests, but rather aggregates of individuals in a certain arithmetical relationship.

The usual assumption of “majority rule” is that membership in government will change over time, so that majorities and minorities are fluid rather than fixed arrangements. But that assumption does not always hold true. Instead, the dynamics of political, economic, and social power may produce minority/majority cleavages of a more enduring nature—particularly when disparities in power follow ethnic, racial, religious, or linguistic divisions. Situations like this existed, for example, in the southern United States prior to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and in apartheid South Africa; in both instances, they paralleled racial divisions, and in Northern Ireland during the “time of troubles,” they paralleled sectarian divisions. If “majority rule” becomes fixed in this way, it is anything but democratic. Instead, it becomes a “tyranny of numbers.”

For this reason, the idea of democracy has itself been reconsidered by liberals, who have come to recognize the need for social consensus that is more than just “majoritarian.” In this rendering, democratic government involves not only making decisions by majority voting but also conceding political rights to minorities. Deny one, and the moral case for the other largely disappears. The contemporary “problem of minorities” thus emerges as a lack of consent or [Page 906]entitlement to full participation in political life such that the principle of democracy is compromised in some way. Minorities are in a position to claim special treatment from majorities precisely because they are not fully integrated into or do not exercise control over their own political community. They are thus “imperfectly” or “incompletely” self-determined.

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