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Theories of Majority Rule

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

John Gilbert Heinberg
John Gilbert Heinberg
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
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Extract

The term “majority rule” is as impossible to escape as it is apparently difficult to define with precision. Aristotle generally employed it to designate the conduct of government by the poor citizens, who were more numerous than the rich, in the Greek city states. In canon law, it meant the verdict of the maior and sanior pars of a small group. Frederic Harrison wrote about the “rule” of the “effective majority”—that section of any community or social aggregate, which, for the matter in hand, practically outweighs the remainder. He explains that it may do so “by virtue of its preponderance in numbers, or in influence, or in force of conviction, or in external resources, or in many other ways.” Sir George Cornewall Lewis thought that where the ultimate decision is vested in a body there is no alternative other than to count numbers, and to abide by the opinion of a majority. But in alleging that “no historian, in discussing the justice or propriety of any decision of a legislative body, or of a court of justice, thinks of defending the decision of the majority by saying that it was the decision of the majority,” he did not anticipate the view of the English historian Hearnshaw. According to the latter, “The faith of a democrat requires him to believe that in the long run the majority of the people finds its way to the truth, and that in the long run it tries to do the right.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , June 1932 , pp. 452 - 469
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1932

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References

1 Politics (Jowett, trans.), IV, 3, 4Google Scholar.

2 Order and Progress (London, 1875), p. 99Google Scholar.

3 The Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion (ed. 1849), p. 211Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., p. 212. Italics are those of the present writer.

5 Democracy and the British Empire (New York, 1920), p. 201Google Scholar. Italics are those of the present writer. In his Democracy at the Crossways (London, 1919), pp. 329–330Google Scholar, Hearnshaw says: “The majority vote represents in a final and authoritative form what the individual vote represents in this provisional and tentative form. It reveals the prevailing tendency in the social organism; it manifests the public opinion of the body politic; it displays the general will of the community as a whole.”

6 Gierke, , ‘Über die Geschichte des Majoritätsprinzips,” in SirVinogradoff, Paul (ed.), Essays in Legal History, Delivered Before the International Congress of Historical Studies (London, 1913), pp. 312–335Google Scholar.

7 Gierke, op. cit., p. 315.

8 Simmel, George, Soziologie (Leipzig, 1908), p. 189Google Scholar.

9 See Avondo, E. Ruffini, “Il Principio maggioritario nelle elezioni dei Re e Imperatori romano-germanici,” in Atti della Reale Accad. delle Science di Torino, Vol. LX (1924–1925), pp. 392–574Google Scholar.

10 Gierke, op. cit., p. 316.

11 Simmel, op. cit., p. 190.

12 Gierke, op. cit., p. 319.

13 Gierke, op. cit., p. 322.

14 Ibid., p. 324.

15 Avondo, E. Ruffini, Il principio maggioritario nella storia del Diritto Canonico (Modena, 1925), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., pp. 11-15. The system referred to was that of concurrent majorities. The assemblies were composed of corporate divisions; each division reached its decision by a majority vote; and a majority of the divisions determined the decision of the assembly as a whole.

17 Ibid., pp. 18-20.

18 Ibid., pp. 22-32. For centuries, the Church had only one method of expressing a collective will, and that was unanimity. Every election was preceded by an invocation to the Holy Ghost to come down and guide the electors. Even after the adoption of the majority device, unanimity remained the ideal of elections. “They talk (but blasphemously enough),” says Selden, John, “that the Holy Ghost is president of their General Councils; where the truth is, the odd man is still the Holy Ghost.” Table Talk (London, 1847), p. 55Google Scholar.

19 This has been given more extensive treatment by the writer in “History of the Majority Principle,” in this Review, Feb., 1926, pp. 52–68Google Scholar.

20 This was done in the Church. See Gierke, , Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht, Vol. III, pp. 323–330Google Scholar. “No body of law,” says Avondo, “as much as canon law contains in fact such a great number of rules which regard eligibility under the psycoethical aspect as well as the juridical aspect.” Op. cit., p. 40.

21 Starosolskyj, W., Das Majoritätsprinzip (Vienna and Leipzig, 1916)Google Scholar. “The question of justifying the norm that the majority decides, as well as that of its historic efficacy, followed the fact of its existence, and was only proposed after the norm had already been acknowledged and applied.” P. 35.

22 The Works of Edmund Burke (Boston, 1904), Vol. IV, pp. 170et seq.Google Scholar

23 “The History of Majority Rule,” Quarterly Review, January, 1912, p. 27Google Scholar.

24 De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Bk. 2, chap. 5, see. 17.

25 Bk. II, chap 1, secs. 2 and 5.

26 Droit de la Nature et des Gens, Bk. VII, chap. 2, sec. 15.

27 Two Treatises on Government, Bk. II, sec. 96. Italics are those of the present writer. Locke thus bases the validity of the majority vote upon necessity, force, reason, and “the law of nature.” Rousseau, however, considered it contrary to the natural order that the majority should govern and the minority by governed. Contract Social, Bk. III, chap. IV. He bases its validity upon the terms of the contract itself. Ibid., Bk. IV, chap. 2.

28 Robert Filmer protests, saying: “As to the acts of the major part of a multitude, it is true, that by politic human constitutions, it is often ordained that the voices of the most shall overrule the rest. … But in assemblies that take their authority from the law of Nature it cannot be so; for what freedom or liberty is due to any man by the law of Nature, no inferior power can alter, limit, or diminish; no one man, nor a multitude, can give away the natural right of another.” Patriarcha, Chap. 2, sec. 6. For the controversy over these concepts in America during the nineteenth century, see Wright, B. F., American Interpretations of Natural Law (Cambridge, 1931), pp. 203–210Google Scholar.

29 “Sovereignty,” as formulated by Bodin, was “supreme power over citizens and subjects, unrestrained by the laws.”

30 With Locke, the sovereign power “can never be supposed to extend farther than the common good, but is obliged to secure every one's property by providing against those three defects … that made the state of nature so unsafe and so uneasy.” Two Treatises on Government, Bk. II, sec. 131.

31 The Leviathan, Chap. 13. Hobbes justified the majority device on the ground of expediency, but did not, of course, contribute directly to the dogma of majority rule. His justification of the majority device is given in Chap. 16 of The Leviathan.

32 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government, Bk. II, chap. 6.

33 For example, in Article 3 of the bill of rights of the Virginia constitution of 1776: “… When any government shall be found inadequate or contrary to these purposes, a majority of the community has both an indubitable, inalienable and indefeasible right to reform, alter or abolish it. …”

34 Contract Social, Bk. IV, chap. 2.

35 Clapham, J. H., The Abbé Siéyès (London, 1912), pp. 45, 75Google Scholar.

36 “We have done with the romance of the Revolution,” wrote Napoleon; “we must now commence its history. We must have eyes only for what is real and practicable in the application of principles, and not for the speculative and hypothetical.” Quoted by Lumley, D. O., “Napoleon as Administrator,” Journal of Public Administration, Vol. I, p. 135Google Scholar.

37 Works (Constitutional ed.), Vol. XI, p. 41Google Scholar.

38 The best summary of the lack of relationship of the dogma to American national government in practice is Beard, Charles A., “The Fiction of Majority Rule,” Atlantic Monthly, Dec., 1927, pp. 831–836Google Scholar.

39 Works, Vol. IV, pp. 171–172Google Scholar.

40 Edinburgh Review, January, 1852, pp. 257–258Google Scholar.

41 An extended treatment of this attack, together with adequate references, is given in Hall, A. B., Popular Government (New York, 1921), pp. 146–171Google Scholar. The dogma of majority rule has been attacked by an endless succession of individuals. For widely held and persistent criticisms, see J. S. Mill, Representative Government, Chap. 7; Senator Reed, James A., in the Congressional Record, June 4, 1926Google Scholar; Mr. Justice Miller, in Loan Association v. Topeka, 20 Wallace 655; Follett, M. P., The New State (London, 1918), pp. 142–155Google Scholar.

42 See Pollard, A. F., The Evolution of Parliament (London, 1920), p. 371Google Scholar; Follett, M. P., The New State, p. 142Google Scholar.

43 The Process of Government (Chicago, 1908), pp. 283–284Google Scholar.

44 Works, Vol. I, “A Disquisition on Government,” etc.

45 Works, Vol. I, p. 28. Italics are those of the present writer.

46 Op. cit., Chap. 7.

47 Ibid., p. 197.

48 Ibid., pp. 199-200.

49 Ibid., p. 202.

50 Ibid., pp. 202-203.

51 Ibid., pp. 204-207.

52 Ibid., p. 225. But Lewis ridicules the idea that a representative is to be considered merely as an envoy of his constituents, entirely bound by instructions. “An attempt to govern the United Kingdom by polling every constituency, upon all questions involved in the daily business by Parliament, is so manifestly absurd that the mere statement of it is a sufficient refutation.” Pp. 268-272.

53 Ibid., p. 212.

54 Ibid., p. 216.

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