Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

by Steven Levitsky

Indeed, where presidents or prime ministers have committed serious crimes, it is essential for democracy to demonstrate that no one is above the law.

America’s excessively counter-majoritarian institutions reinforce extremism, empower authoritarian minorities, and threaten minority rule. To overcome these problems, we must double down on democracy. This means dismantling spheres of undue minority protection and empowering majorities at all levels of government; it means ending constitutional protectionism and unleashing real political competition; it means bringing the balance of political power more closely in line with the balance of voter preferences; and it means forcing our politicians to be more responsive and accountable to majorities of Americans. In short, we must democratize our democracy, undertaking long overdue constitutional and electoral reforms that would, at minimum, bring America in line with other established democracies.

UPHOLD THE RIGHT TO VOTE. The right to vote is a core element of any modern definition of democracy.

Voting in America should be as straightforward as it is in democracies in Europe and elsewhere. This means we should do the following:

1. Pass a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for all citizens, which would provide a solid basis to litigate voting restrictions.

2. Establish automatic registration in which all citizens are registered to vote when they turn eighteen. This could be accompanied by the automatic distribution of national voting ID cards to all citizens. The burdens of the registration process should not deter anyone from voting.

3. Expand early voting and easy mail-in voting options for citizens of all states. It should be easy for all Americans to cast ballots.

4. Make Election Day a Sunday or a national holiday, so that work responsibilities do not discourage Americans from voting.

5. Restore voting rights (without additional fines or fees) to all ex-felons who have served their time.

6. Restore national-level voting rights protections. In the spirit of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, parts of which the Supreme Court struck down in 2013, we should reinstate federal oversight of election rules and administration. This could apply only in states and localities with a history of voting rights violations, following the VRA model, or to all jurisdictions equally, following the model of the 1890 Lodge bill.

7. Replace the current system of partisan electoral administration with one in which state and local electoral administration is in the hands of professional, nonpartisan officials. This will help ensure fairness in the updating of voter rolls, access to polling places, and the voting and vote-counting processes. Nearly every other established democracy, from France and Germany to Brazil, Costa Rica, Japan, and South Africa, has nonpartisan referees to oversee elections.

ENSURE THAT ELECTION OUTCOMES REFLECT MAJORITY PREFERENCES. Those who win the most votes should win elections.

8. Abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a national popular vote. No other presidential democracy permits the loser of the popular vote to win the presidency. Such a constitutional amendment very nearly passed as recently as 1970.

9. Reform the Senate so that the number of senators elected per state is more proportional to the population of each state (as in Germany). California and Texas should elect more senators than Vermont and Wyoming. Because Article V of the U.S. Constitution stipulates that “no state, without its Consent, may be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate” (a form of liberum veto), we understand the barriers to such a reform are enormous. But because the structure of the Senate so subverts basic democratic principles, and with such great consequence, any list of important democratizing reforms must include it.

10. Replace “first-past-the-post” electoral rules and single-member districts for the House of Representatives and state legislatures with a form of proportional representation in which voters elect multiple representatives from larger electoral districts and parties win seats in proportion to the share of the vote they win. This would require repeal of the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act, which mandates single-member districts for House elections. By ensuring that the distribution of seats in Congress more accurately reflects the way Americans vote, a proportional representation system would prevent the problem of “manufactured majorities,” in which parties that win fewer votes in an election capture a majority of seats in the legislature. As the political scientist Lee Drutman writes, a proportional representation system “treats all voters equally, regardless of where they live. And it treats all parties the same, regardless of where their voters live.”

11. Eliminate partisan gerrymandering via the creation of independent redistricting commissions such as those used in California, Colorado, and Michigan.

12. Update the Apportionment Act of 1929, which fixed the House of Representatives at 435, and return to the original design of a House that expands in line with population growth. At present, the ratio of voters to representatives in the House is nearly five times higher than that of any European democracy. Expanding the size of Congress would bring representatives closer to the people, and, if the Electoral College and the current Senate structure remain in place, mitigate the small-state bias of the Electoral College.

EMPOWER GOVERNING MAJORITIES.

13. Abolish the Senate filibuster (a reform that requires neither statutory nor constitutional change), thereby eliminating the ability of partisan minorities to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities. In no other established democracy is such a minority veto routinely employed.

14. Establish term limits (perhaps twelve or eighteen years) for Supreme Court justices to regularize the Supreme Court appointment process so that every president has the same number of appointments per term. Such a reform would place the United States in the mainstream of all other major democracies in the world. This would also limit the court’s intergenerational counter-majoritarianism.

15. Make it easier to amend the Constitution by eliminating the requirement that three-quarters of state legislatures ratify any proposed amendment. Requiring two-thirds supermajorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate for a constitutional amendment would bring America in line with most other established democracies, including federal democracies like Germany and India, as well as many U.S. states.

Unlike citizens of other established democracies, Americans tend to resist the notion that our Constitution has flaws or deficiencies that should be corrected, or that parts of it may be out of date. As Aziz Rana observes, many Americans embrace the Constitution with an “almost religious devotion.” We treat the framers as if they were endowed with almost divine or supernatural powers, and we treat the Constitution as if it were a sacred document—one that is “basically perfect.” In other words, our society operates under the assumption that our founding institutions are, in effect, best practice—across history and in all contexts. The idea that the U.S. Constitution cannot be improved upon is not based on empirical evidence or serious debate. Rather, it is an article of faith.