4 ms·

The definition of democracy as "free and fair elections" alone is subject to tyranny of the majority.

mk_chan 2y ago
Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.
- alephnerd 2y ago
  And this is how Indian elections work. The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection. These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
- rectang 2y ago
  That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.
  - mk_chan 2y ago
    The way I put it was meant to be slightly amusing, but let me put it a different way for the sake of discussion. For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles. Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people. The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world. So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so. Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes. Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.
rayiner 2y ago
The problem with any other definition of democracy is that there’s an irreconcilable bootstrapping problem. Democracy is a way to make collective decisions about governance among people who don’t agree on things. The beauty of democracy is that we can all agree on a procedural rule (majoritarian voting) separate and apart from substantive decisions. If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions from the majoritarian rule, that poses a conundrum: how do you decide what’s exempted, and how do you make decisions about issues within that exempted space?
- rectang 2y ago
  Well, the obvious answer is that rights, along with legislative procedures, etc, get codified in a constitution which takes a supermajority to amend. In a perfect world that constitution is approved at a constitutional convention by a supermajority of the citizenry acting through their representatives; in practice it arrives via various historical means, including outside imposition. Despite the "irreconcilable bootstrapping problem", constitutional democracies somehow exist. But yeah yeah that's not "true democracy" because anything other than majoritarianism is a grotesque western perversion of the perfect immaculate glorious ideal of "simple majority rules on everything". Whatever.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Who decides what those “rights” are? You need a source for those rules that is respected by the governed as legitimately superseding the popular will. Constitutional democracy exists in America, for example, because Americans had shared english political norms stretching back to the Magna Carta. They could invoke the “god-given rights of Englishmen” and that’s would have purchase among the electorate. What equivalent do you have in India (or Bangladesh or Iraq or Afghanistan)? You can try imposing the same ancient political norms that existed in Britain, and that’s what the Indian constitution did. But you can’t scream “you’re doing democracy wrong!” when Indians refuse to give much weight to those colonial impositions, as is happening.
    - rectang 2y ago

Ironically, tyranny of the majority is a very very good definition of democracy if you drill the majority down into subcategorical majorities recursively until you reach the individual who might be severely disconnected from the averages.

alephnerd 2y ago
And this is how Indian elections work. The amount of data collection and analysis is insane. Election Consulting Companies like I-PAC and Showtime Consulting would gather extremely granular religious (sect level), ethnic (sub-clan level), age, linguistic (sub-dialect level), economic, and social metrics and poll on a near weekly basis, and work with the parties that hired them to iterate on electoral messaging and promises based on the selected demographic intersection. These consulting firms also pay Microsoft and Google India level salaries so they are attracting the best of the best at top Indian universities.
rectang 2y ago
That's amusing, but silly. A criminal screeching "tyranny of the majority!" as they get hauled away is not a revealing example and does not reflect the phrase's usual meaning.
- mk_chan 2y ago
  The way I put it was meant to be slightly amusing, but let me put it a different way for the sake of discussion. For this purpose, I like to mentally model a country (or territory which decided to hold an election of some kind) as a collection of points in a multidimensional space of values or policies which are up for election. Each point represents where a voting person would stand according to their personal principles. Now, I’d like to postulate that the act of voting corresponds to finding the center of the cluster of points. In this model, it’s easy to imagine the scenario where a very large portion of people (and possibly even the majority) are deeply dissatisfied with the result because they are too far on many dimensions from the center that was elected. This is actually further exacerbated by many factors in real life like the asymmetry of information between people. The obvious solution would be to create more cluster centers instead of one fat cluster that leaves everyone not very happy. This corresponds to states or provinces within a country in the real world. So coming from that line of thinking, it leads me to believe that sometimes to maintain a democracy, you need to cut the outliers away to move/make the center such that people are happy with the result. Essentially you enforce the will of the majority by cutting away the minority until it is no longer a tyranny to do so. Of course this is gross simplification of real life. It is ignoring factors such as external threats, instability, unpredictability, information availability and so on. However, I think it’s useful to think this way for many purposes. Addressing your extreme example of a criminal, that’s a point so far off in the space that you definitely want to cut it out of the system.

rayiner 2y ago

The problem with any other definition of democracy is that there’s an irreconcilable bootstrapping problem. Democracy is a way to make collective decisions about governance among people who don’t agree on things. The beauty of democracy is that we can all agree on a procedural rule (majoritarian voting) separate and apart from substantive decisions. If you want to exempt certain decisions or categories of decisions from the majoritarian rule, that poses a conundrum: how do you decide what’s exempted, and how do you make decisions about issues within that exempted space?

rectang 2y ago
Well, the obvious answer is that rights, along with legislative procedures, etc, get codified in a constitution which takes a supermajority to amend. In a perfect world that constitution is approved at a constitutional convention by a supermajority of the citizenry acting through their representatives; in practice it arrives via various historical means, including outside imposition. Despite the "irreconcilable bootstrapping problem", constitutional democracies somehow exist. But yeah yeah that's not "true democracy" because anything other than majoritarianism is a grotesque western perversion of the perfect immaculate glorious ideal of "simple majority rules on everything". Whatever.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Who decides what those “rights” are? You need a source for those rules that is respected by the governed as legitimately superseding the popular will. Constitutional democracy exists in America, for example, because Americans had shared english political norms stretching back to the Magna Carta. They could invoke the “god-given rights of Englishmen” and that’s would have purchase among the electorate. What equivalent do you have in India (or Bangladesh or Iraq or Afghanistan)? You can try imposing the same ancient political norms that existed in Britain, and that’s what the Indian constitution did. But you can’t scream “you’re doing democracy wrong!” when Indians refuse to give much weight to those colonial impositions, as is happening.
  - rectang 2y ago