Chapter 8 first provides an overview of the stipulations regarding how things held in tenancy in common (the most common co-ownership form of property around the world) should be administered and sold, as well as co-owner agreements not to partition. Then, Chapter 8 addresses whether the several types of rules lead to underuse or overuse — that is, whether tenancy in common may lead to tragedy of the commons or anticommons. The prevalent doctrine that provides one co-owner with a unilateral power to call for partition avoids a long-term tragedy but underinvestment and underuse of co-owned resources are still likely. This chapter ends with a proposed solution to ameliorate the underinvestment and underuse problems.

Peacemaking practice shows that national minorities are aware of the shortcomings of liberal democracy and human rights to secure their fundamental interests, and when they come to the negotiating table their focal points are not bills of rights, but rather inclusive political institutions. This political inclusivity often involves the use of power-sharing democracy, a political framework that intentionally accommodates competing ethno-national groups within the state’s governing structures. Many experts, nongovernmental organizations, scholars, and policymakers have also recommended power-sharing as the more adequate institutional design for such places. This chapter evaluates democratic power-sharing vis-è-vis the more common model of majoritarian democracy to support the argument that a revision of our taken-for-granted assumptions about what “proper” democracy looks like is needed. To illustrate the general observations, the chapter reviews the use of power-sharing systems in Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Northern Ireland.

This chapter examines how different democratic decision-procedures – voting, majority rule, compromise, consensus, and public deliberation – relate to claims for recognition and democratic respect. Via a contrast with Rousseau and an explication of majority rule as a principle that regulates political decision-making over time, the chapter challenges the common view that populism is characterized by its unequivocal adherence to democratic principles of popular sovereignty and majority rule. The second part of the chapter discusses compromise as an attitude one can take when making decisions with one’s fellow citizens. Populists regard compromise as a form of betrayal, weakness, and defeat, while this chapter defends it as an important aspect of democratic respect. Political theorists have discussed whether the reasons for compromise are only pragmatic or whether they can also be principled. Populism’s principled rejection of compromise shows why our defense of this practice must be principled. The last part of the chapter connects the spirit of compromise to the notion of solidarity sketched in Chapter 2 and argues that compromise can be seen as a form of solidaristic inclusion of people with whom one profoundly disagrees.

This chapter analyzes historical and cross-national evidence to contend that the angry politics of populism does not simply reflect the autonomous preferences of voters shocked by the pressures of globalization. Rather, voters express right-wing identity issues only after politicians – especially mainstream center-right politicians – have accentuated appeals to cultural self-defense in their own electoral campaigns. In brief, the identity appeals of populism emerge as a product of mainstream political parties’ efforts to cope with the contradictions of capitalism and democracy in an age of high socioeconomic inequality. In this sense, the very notion of a cultural majority is itself politically constructed – an imagined community of ephemeral democratic normative weight, crafted by center-right political parties as they scramble to try win electoral majorities in an age of heightened socioeconomic inequality. While Madisonian political majorities have normative weight, cultural majorities do not. If correct, this argument suggests that a focus on addressing the economic roots of populism is pivotal as is developing a civic notion of citizenship, no matter the ethnicity or background of citizens.

Multiculturalism has been turned upside down. Stated in the 1990s as a political theory and public policy of cultural minority rights, its language of cultural victimhood, oppression, and alienation has been hijacked by politicians speaking on behalf of national majorities. Some scholars have argued that liberal arguments for cultural group rights must apply to majorities as well as to minorities. I object that the notion of cultural majority rights is incoherent on empirical and conceptual grounds, and indefensible on normative grounds. The chapter suggests an alternative approach that relies on the core values of freedom, equality, and self-government. These values serve to justify cultural freedom rights for everybody, cultural rights for minorities, and powers and duties to establish a pluralistic public culture that includes all citizens. I claim that this framework covers all cultural rights that can be defended on grounds of liberal and democratic principles. There is no space left for special rights of cultural majorities.

Elected representatives do not faithfully deliver policies desired by majorities of their constituents. While many blame special interests or failures by voters for frustrated majorities, I suggest these explanations incomplete. Voters can cause candidates for office to frustrate majorities because of differences in issue intensity. This chapter presents the controversy, the basic argument, connections to single-issue voters and issue publics, the main results, and the scope and outline of the book.

In this chapter I explore three extensions to the mathematical model presented in Chapter 4. First, I show that the results do not depend upon the balance of minority to majority assumed in Chapter 4. Instead, at any ratio of majority to minority size, candidates might side with an intense minority over a less-intense majority. Candidates do not, however, side with any intense minority, siding only with those of a sufficient combination of size and intensity. Second, I consider the free-rider problem in large electorates. I discuss a modification to the mathematical model where increasing the size of the electorate does not prevent some voters from choosing to incur costly political action. Finally, I consider the social welfare implications of intensity theory showing that utilitarian welfare can sometimes be higher with frustrated majorities and costly political action than under simple majority rule.

In this chapter I present results from a mathematical formalization of intensity theory. I apply tools from game theory to analyze the dynamics of electoral competition when voters vary in how much they care about policy and when candidates do not know which voters care more and less intensely. I show that candidates for office choose policy platforms as a function of the size and intensity of opposing policy coalitions. Candidates sometimes set policy with an intense minority even though they know that a less-intense majority wants the opposite policy. But they also sometimes choose not to frustrate majorities even with an intense minority.

This chapter provides an introduction to the meaning of issue intensity and frustrated majorities through review of the existing theory and evidence of political science. I suggest that while theories of trade politics, bureacracy, legislative behavior, and political parties have explicitly or implicitly considered the consequences of varying issue intensity, the political science of elections has given it short attention. I show how the political science of the electoral connection complicates many existing explanations for frustrated majorities and suggest that adding issue intensity to the electoral connection provides an improved explanation.

In this concluding chapter I summarize the theoretical and empirical results, provide a recipe to apply intensity theory in new settings, revisit and speculate about model assumptions, suggest five key implications for our understanding of representation, electoral competition, and political action, discuss the potential importance of issue intensity for the dynamics of policy change, and offer concluding thoughts.

This chapter examines two modalities of equitable intervention in corporate governance in cases of shareholder conflict. The first involves the extension of fiduciary duties to controlling shareholders, and the second judicial review on the grounds of oppression. Both forms of intervention are intended to be responsive to pathologies inherent in majoritarian governance in organizations featuring enfranchised members. Notwithstanding long-settled authority in Delaware and other American states for the proposition that controlling shareholders are fiduciaries of minority shareholders, I argue that fiduciary regulation is an inapt modality of equitable intervention given the nature of the problems generated by majority rule in corporations. By comparison, the oppression remedy—favored in commonwealth jurisdictions—enables more apt and effective tailored responses to these problems. The choice between these modalities of intervention implicates a choice between equity’s supplemental contributions to first-order law and its corrective, second-order intervention in first-order law. The chapter concludes with some general reflections on the place of equity in contemporary law.

The introduction explains the global-historical, interdisciplinary, and historiographical importance of this topic; sketches the history of decision-making in popular assemblies prior to the seventeenth century; and describes how the book will conceptualize and measure consensual and majoritarian forms of decision-making in the English House of Commons and the colonial lower assemblies. Majority decision-making is taken to be either natural or automatic in politics. This is short-sighted. The dominance of majority decision-making as a global standard for political decision-making is therefore something to be explained, not assumed. It is impossible, therefore, properly to address the promise and pitfalls of majority rule today without a history of its rise at the ready. This book is the first such history. It describes and explains the crucial moment in the majority’s global rise to power: its embrace by the elected assemblies of Britain and America in the age of the English, Glorious, and American Revolutions.

The Conclusion demonstrates the global-historical and interdisciplinary importance of early modern developments in the history of majority rule. It sketches the modern history of majoritarian decision-making in the elected assemblies of the United States, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and the postcolonial polities that emerged from their empires and the tumult of the two world wars. It then explains the basic ways in which the history of the rise of the majority in early modern Britain and its empire recasts majority rule as a political problem in a way that has important implications for political science, political theory, and wider public debate. It shows that all of the basic maladies identified today in debates over the state of representative democracy were present, identified, and discussed in the seventeenth century. In particular, contemporaries experienced and described the threat that majority rule posed to the role of rational, informed argument and inclusion in national decision-making.