Majoritarian Democracy Reassessed

This paper attempts to show that while fear of democracy turning into a ‘majoritarian’ system is rational, it is not always realistic because of the inherent inconsistencies in the idea of ‘community cohesion’. Traditional notion of community, constituted by oneness of race, religion, culture or caste, has been seriously contested by upsurge of ‘salad bowl’ multicultural societies comprising assortment of races, cultures and religions. Even as the trajectories of modern democracies appear to foreground the ethnicisation of its politics, it does not amount to a full-fledged ethnicisation of the communities at large. A thoroughly united community, if there is one, looks real only in the realm of imagination.


Introduction
Reflections on democracy are laced with a hope that despite being rule by majority democracy will operate within certain philosophical and constitutional constraints that will not to allow it to violate the rights of minorities. Supporters of the democracy wax confident that since a system chosen and built by people themselves cannot become antipeople, any aberration in the stated objective of democracy comes more as an exception than a rule. However, a sense of trepidation prevails, especially about the oft-encountered incapacity of democracyparliamentary democracy in particular -to convert the rule of majority into the rule by consensus that is accommodative of minorities. When a democratic leadership begins to invoke majoritarian sentiment to get elected and harness the liberal institutions to further an anti-minority agenda, it is natural for the apprehensions over the litheness of democracy to arise. The electoral triumph of Donald Trump in US, Erdogan in Turkey and Narendra Modi in India is already broadening those apprehensions (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).
Democracy sustains in the vote of the majority population, and precisely for that reason, it spawns the threat of majority dominance in a society seething with racial, religious, and caste divides. What is one to do, for instance, if the majority wants an anti-minority legislation passed and votes a favorably inclined government to power to execute it, or the political executive starts exerting an undesirable influence on the democratic institutions to toe a particular ideological line?
It is because of the propensity of the elected representatives to pander to their majority constituency that the questions are raised whether democracy is truly inclusive of minorities in the plural societies. A vociferous champion of representative democracy, John Stuart Mill advocated the need for proportional voting system to ensure the Revista Científica Arbitrada de l a Fundación M enteCl ara Vol. 5 (2020), ISSN 2469-0783 4 protection of minority interests against the majoritarian tendencies in the democracy (Mill, 2010 (Rousseau, 1993). To Gandhi, representative democracy was not going to work in a multicultural country like India, and he tended to draw from Mill that "democracy was next to impossible in multi-ethnic societies and completely impossible in linguistically divided countries" (Mill cited in Lijphart, 1996).
Multiculturalism is the mainstay of the contemporary societies. no matter how many times they vote and how many issues they vote on?

Community Cohesion is Unrealistic
This paper attempts to show while fear of democracy turning into a 'majoritarian' system is rational, it is not always realistic because of the inherent inconsistencies in the idea of 'community cohesion'. Traditional notion of community, constituted by oneness of race, religion, culture or caste, has been seriously contested by upsurge of 'salad bowl' multicultural societies comprising assortment of races, cultures and religions (Kymlicka & Bashir, 2008). Even as the trajectories of modern democracies appear to foreground the ethnicisation of its politics, it does not amount to a full-fledged ethnicisation of the communities at large. A thoroughly united community, if there is one, looks real only in the realm of imagination.
Even normatively, the concept of majoritarian democracy, singularly dominated by a numerically superior community, looks logically flawed.
Going by the way the democratic decision-making happens, one does not usually find individual interests coalescing into a collective interest.
Suppose a person wants to buy a car and has an option of choosing from Revista Científica Arbitrada de l a Fundación M enteCl ara Vol. 5 (2020), ISSN 2469-0783 6 two models: an expensive model that comes fitted with a pollution control equipment, and a cheaper model that is without such an equipment. In such a case, buyer is surely not going to pay more to own the expensive model just because it is good for environment. She will, as it were, end up buying the cheaper model even if she favours the pollution control measures in her individual capacity (Hardin, 1990). In other words, a person is focused more deeply on what benefits her individually than the collective benefits resulting from her actions.

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
The roots of the argument that individual rankings do not get converted to collective ranking go back to public choice theory associated with Condorcet's 'Problem of Cyclic Majorities' and Kenneth Arrow's 'Impossibility Theorem' (Sen, 1979 Arrow's Theorem at least hypothetically proves genuine democracy would be impossible under the present voting system, because no voting system, regardless of its efficiency and utility, can be true represen tative of the voters. Given this imperfectability, one might be tempted to ask whether having such a skewed voting system is good or bad for the democracy. Ironical it might sound; the fact is Arrow's concern may actually make the democracy healthier in the ethnically divided societies  Muhammadan would associate with them, and who are forbidden to enter the mosque or to use the public burial ground' (Fazl, 2006). Even in politics, "the election data show Muslim support to political parties was never constant" (Shakir, 1990). As for Muslims turning out in huge numbers to vote in masse for particular parties, data from 2004 Lok Sabha elections reveal the turnout among Muslims was lower than the national average in those elections. In fact, in four elections before 2004, the Muslim turnout was 59% as against the national average of 60% (Patra, 2006). All this shows Muslim community may not be as cohesive as it is projected in the popular fancies.

Dalits and Muslims -A Myth of Community Cohesion
But if that is the case, one might ask whether the imperfect voting system leading to a truncated democracy does away altogether with the threats -both real and perceived-to the minorities in an ethnically divided society. It may not. Democracy does harbour prejudices of the majority that often show in its priviledging the numerically superior chunk of the people. Often beneath the pervasive incidence of poverty affecting the Dalit and Muslim population in India, what lurks glaringly is widespread social exclusion grounded in the multiple prejudices (Borooah et al., 2015).
Having said that, it is also important to underline there can never be persistent majority or minority because the communities in reality are never a well-knit mass of people. It is true that political communities are founded on certain identities -common culture, ethnicity, religion or caste -with members drawing their personal identity from the larger community identity and taking pride in flaunting it. Beyond this, identical voting pattern in both. But the Indian voters have proved that hypothesis wrong in last six years.

Conclusion
It is difficult to see how any community can achieve a perfect similarity of interests. Occupational patterns, linguistic preferences, regional differences, and the motley religious beliefs make the members within one community starkly different from others. To say ethnic identity invariably gets preferentially treated is to overlook the other differentiating indicators that are no less important. In majority cases, when people go to polling booths, they carry multiple issues with them that determine who they will vote for. Mostly, these issues are those of bread and butter, and sometimes also of identity, but identity surfaces only when there is competitive polarisation. Since competitive polarisation is not perennial to any society, there is a hope for the democracy to be simply humanitarian without being either overtly majoritarian or openly minoritarian.