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

by Steven Levitsky

The United States, once a democratic pioneer and model for other nations, has now become a democratic laggard. The endurance of our pre-democratic institutions as other democracies have dismantled theirs makes us a uniquely counter-majoritarian democracy at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Consider the following: America is the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College, rather than directly by voters. Only in America can a president be “elected against the majority expressed at the polls.” America is one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber, and it is one of an even smaller number of democracies in which a powerful upper chamber is severely malapportioned due to the “equal representation of unequal states” (only Argentina and Brazil are worse). Most important, it is the world’s only democracy with both a strong, malapportioned Senate and a legislative minority veto (the filibuster). In no other democracy do legislative minorities routinely and permanently thwart legislative majorities. America is one of the few established democracies (along with Canada, India, Jamaica, and the U.K.) with first-past-the-post electoral rules that permit electoral pluralities to be manufactured into legislative majorities and, in some cases, allow parties that win fewer votes to win legislative majorities. America is the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenur...