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Pure majoritarianism isn't necessarily best either, it just always takes the majority's side in disputes where a strongly-held minority opinion comes in conflict with a weakly-held majority one. Like, it's obvious that you should take the side of the majority when it's "we'd rather not be slightly inconvenienced by paying for rent-seekers" regardless of how intensely the minority of rent-seekers want to rent-seek, but it's much less obvious that we should have zero handouts to narrow interests when it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment, I don't care how little the general public is aware of and cares about it and would generally prefer lower taxes"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-prices-reach-new-highin-th...

lotsofpulp 1266 days ago

> but it's much less obvious that we should have zero handouts to narrow interests when it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment, I don't care how little the general public is aware of and cares about it and would generally prefer lower taxes"

In reality, this turns into we should have billion dollar handouts to narrow interests because rather than use taxpayer funds to R&D cures into the public domain using the existing world class university system, the narrow interests would prefer being able to benefit from patented medicines:

> Since August, U.S. or European health regulators have approved four new products intended as one-time treatments for rare genetic diseases that carry list prices of at least $2 million a patient, including two from Bluebird Bio Inc.

Okay, make the hypothetical be malaria nets or insulin then. The exact specifics don't matter all that much, it's just an illustration that you can't use issue-by-issue majoritarianism to generate a coalition that can pass a broadly popular group of policies that lacks individual plank-by-plank popularity. There's no enforcement mechanism to coordinate a "you vote for my pet issue and I'll vote for yours".

> it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment

That's an extreme extrapolation. Sure, the majority would maybe not care at all for such a minority treatment if it came to pass. But then again, the practical reality is that in a system that allows minority to override the majority, everything else goes wrong even if that one goes right.

There is an example. The US was explicitly crafted as a format that would allow the minority to override the majority to prevent 'the tyranny of the majority'. This was explicitly expressed by various founding fathers of the US, especially by de facto architect of its constutition, John Adams. And that's the reason why there is FPTP, the Senate, the supreme court, with the latter two easily able to override whatever majority vote is.

They did this because they feared the majority demanding land redistribution and passing it with their vote. The British aristocrats' lands were confiscated and redistributed after the revolution, that was ok. But the founding fathers feared that it would give ideas to the people about the lands of the now-American-but-ex-British elite like themselves.

jamiek88 1266 days ago

No.

We live in representative democracies not absolute democracies and these table thumping maximalist positions rarely make good conversation or policy.

They get retweeted though.

> representative democracies / absolute democracies

The dichotomy above is impossible to interpret. What does that even mean. So when a democracy is representative, the minority's will can override the majority's will? Then what does the representation part in the representative democracy mean.

> So when a democracy is representative, the minority's will can override the majority's will?

Yes, and this is a feature, not a bug. Majority voting on issues one at a time cannot generate a deal that a majority would prefer when the compromise is presented as a block. Eg, if there are six different compatible single-issues that 10% of the people care solely about each, each individual one would get voted down 90-10, while representatives can make a bargain that delivers a combined platform approved of by 60%.

That's not relevant. You are talking about coalition governments, in which the ensuing coalition government still represents the will of the majority. Each ~20% segment of the population represented by the 20% participant in the coalition government pushing forth ~20% supported issues and passing them does not mean that those are the will if the minority. It means that only 20% want to pass it now, but the rest do NOT object to its passing. That's still a majority government.

For a democratic majority-minority situation to occur, you must have 20% of the population wanting to pass something, but at least 20% of the population opposing it.

In this hypothetical, the rest do object to the pet issues of others in the coalition, but only weakly. Like, I personally would vote against corn subsidies by itself, for abortion rights, and for a package of (corn subsidies plus abortion rights). The exact policies I mentioned don't particularly matter, I'm sure you can find your own set of two issues that you'd vote this way on if it came down to it - the issues you have an opinion on, but you'd hold your nose and concede the issue if it was the price of something really important to you.

And when two or more minority interest groups feel this way on each other's issues, it is a failure to enact the "will of the people" if you use strict issue-by-issue majoritarianism. After all, each individual pet issue fails on its own merits - they just aren't broadly popular enough.

Fundamentally, the issue is that strengths of preferences do not show up in a referendum on a topic. Furthermore, there's no way to credibly commit to a compromise that gets you something important in exchange for a relatively unimportant concession. I'm not saying these issues outweigh the benefits of direct democracy, they're just problems that can get solved by a representative system.

> In this hypothetical, the rest do object to the pet issues of others in the coalition, but only weakly

That means that the majority wants those issues. If 20% of the population wants something, 10% opposes it, and 70% doesnt care if it passes, it means that a majority wants that policy to pass. The majority does not need to be for something explicitly for it to be a majority decision. There has to be more people in a society wanting something than those who dont, and the rest not objecting to that policy. Its still a majority decision.

lotsofpulp 1266 days ago

What does compatible mean if they would get voted down 90-10?

Something like a policy proposal costing a low but non-zero amount of money for exactly zero benefit outside of the eyes of the 10% who really care about their pet cause. The non-packaged proposals get voted down not because the majority hates them, but because they don't care, at least not like the special interest does.

If a vector space is more your jam, imagine a six-dimensional vector space of policies, and each of these six hypothetical interest groups as voting for any combination of policies with a positive value along the axis in question, and against any combination of policies with a negative value. [100, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1], [-1, 100, -1, -1, -1, -1], etc, will each get voted down when presented individually as policies, but their sum as a package gets supported by each interest group.

lotsofpulp 1266 days ago

I see, thanks for example.