A Qualified Defence of Majoritarian Democracy
| Date | 01 October 1982 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9256.1982.tb00071.x |
| Author | James L Hyland |
| Published date | 01 October 1982 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
How
To Decide That Voters Decide
29
2.
It
is worth noting that three out of ten question items here are either factually
misleading or ambiguous. On
(4)
social security benefits are paid not for
strikers but for their families. On
(6)
there is of course no 'right to strike'
in Britain: there are only certain immunities for trades unions against civil
actions for damages caused by strikes, and requirements that there be only mass
sackings of strikers
for
breach of contract rather than individual victimizations.
Additionally many groups of workers cannot legally go on strike already, e.g.
policemen or seamen at sea. On
(9)
'management and planning' could refer to
corporations, or government, or such a wide range of other actors that
it
is hard
to see what might be meant by any answer one way or another.
3.
See Dunleavy (1980), pp.532-3.
4.
The authors used 32 attitudinal items in
1970
and
37
in
1974:
of
these a rough
subjective classification placed nearly half
of
them within the ambit of
Conservative party policy, a further
30
per cent reflected Liberal or generalized
centrists positions, and about one-fifth fell within the ambit of official Labour
policy. However, just as right wing items predominated on economic issues,
so
respondents seemed to be 'cued' with liberal or Labour options on other issues
-
all three education options were pro-Labour, for example. My point here is not
of course that respondents always welcomed cuing, but that homogenously slanted
questions whatever the direction of slant
will
not tap complex attitude structures
successfully.
References
Dunleavy,
P.
(19801, 'The political implications of sectoral cleavages and the growth
of state employment', Political Studies.Vo1.28, No.3, pp.364-383, No.4, pp.527-544.
Dunleavy,
P.
and Ward,
H.
power', British Journal of Political Science,
11.
Vol.11, No.3, pp.351-380.
Himmelweit,
H.,
Humphreys,
P.,
Jaeger,
M.
and Katz,
M.
(London: Academic Press).
(1981),
'Exogenous voter preferences and parties with state
(1981), How Voters Decide
-0-000-0-
A QUALIFIED DEFENCE OF MAJORITARIAN DEMOCRACY
JAMES
L
HYLAND
In a brief note in Volume
1,
No.
2
of 'Politics' Peter Morriss identifies what
he calls 'another contradiction in the theory of majoritarian democracy' (Morriss,
1981). What Morriss demonstrates is that majoritarian democratic procedures
do
not
guarantee that outcomes
will
necessarily correspond to either the majority's wants
-
or to its moral views.
argument based on the assumptuion that
if
a majority votes for something then either
a majority wants
it
or
a majority thinks
it
morally right.
Is
this a particularly
darnag
i
ng paradox?
In the first place, what Morriss has demonstrated is
-
not a paradox or internal
inconsistency in a unitary democratic theory. His argument,
if
sound, shows the
invalidity of two distinct, alternative justifications for rnajoritarianism.
second place, the arguments are only shown to be invalid in
so
far as they assume
the universal truth of the questioned premise.
with the claim that the premise is 'for the most part' true; a claim that is not upset
by the production of a single counter-example.
is
produced by formulating the questioned premise in a manner that implies that a
justification of majoritarianism must be based exclusively on one or the other of
the two disjuncts.
Consequently, such procedures cannot be justified by any
In the
Either of the arguments might get by
Furthermore, the illusion of paradox
That this assumption is unwarranted can be easily demonstrated.
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