[unity1001]

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.

[ThrustVectoring]

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.

[unity1001]

> 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.

[ThrustVectoring]

> If 20% of the population wants something, 10% opposes it, and 70% doesnt care if it passes

That isn't the hypothetical I'm using to make my point. Obviously if you change the hypothetical you come up with different results, but then it isn't the scenario I'm using as an intuition pump.

Like, what I'm getting at is that there are sometimes policies you want your government to pass, even though more people oppose it than support it and nobody being truly undecided. Not all policy choices are equally important, and not everyone considers all policy choices equally important. A referendum is structurally incapable of enacting policies with minority support, for good or for bad. It's usually for good, true, but there are circumstances where you can do better by making sure that people think that the important policies are implemented, even at the cost of the majority not getting their way on relatively unimportant matters.

[unity1001]

> even though more people oppose it than support it

In no case in which sufficient amount of people oppose something, a policy can pass. Of course, Im talking about proportional representation systems. In first past the post, what you speak of is possible if that issue is not so critical to that amount of people that they may not vote on it as their #1 issue. Then the opposing party can win with a low margin on some other issue in which they have majority, meanwhile passing that other policy as well. This is an ill of the FPTP system. In proportional representation, that does not happen.

Of course, FPTP itself is something that was implemented to avoid the democracy of the majority, so that's no surprise.

[dragonwriter]

> A referendum is structurally incapable of enacting policies with minority support, for good or for bad.

With a single-subject rule, that’s often (but not always) true; without it, it is less true, because policies can be packaged to achieve a combined majority, so long as there isn’t a majority that thinks it is important enough to defeat any part to overcome any support within that majority for other parts. (Even with a single-subject rule, this can sometimes be done, so long as the policies packaged relate to sufficiently closely related subject matter as to fit within the way the rule is applied.)

This is common in legislative bodies, and it works with citizen-legislators, too.

[ThrustVectoring]

Even without a single-subject rule, there's zero enforcement mechanism to prevent other interest groups from reneging on the packaging agreement and defeating one or more parts in detail. There's no stable point you can get via referenda if (policy A + policy B), (policy not-A), and (policy not-B) all would garner majority votes.

[dragonwriter]

> Even without a single-subject rule, there’s zero enforcement mechanism to prevent other interest groups from reneging on the packaging agreement and defeating one or more parts in detail.

Sure, after the package passes, groups can try to form separate coalitions to pick things out of it; there are methods to protect them, generally (such as putting together a similar coalition to put up a trigger bill that deletes the parts the other groups want to protect conditioned on the other repeal passing, undermining its support.)

> There’s no stable point

Yeah, real world politics is generally not about finding stable equilibria, as much are the things most easily amenable to theoretical analysis.