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

by Steven Levitsky

Parliaments everywhere thus offered excessive protection to minority interests. An extreme example was Poland’s eighteenth-century parliament (Sejm), in which each deputy in the two-hundred-member body possessed individual veto over any bill. The French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau regarded Poland’s liberum veto (Latin for “I freely object”) as, in the words of one legal analyst, a “tyranny of the minority of one.” The system’s defenders characterized it as a “privilege of our liberty.” But it brought political life to a grinding halt. Between 1720 and 1764, more than half of Poland’s parliamentary sessions were shut down by individual vetoes or filibusters before any decisions were made. Unable to conduct government business or raise public funds for defense, Poland fell prey to military interventions by neighboring Russia, Prussia, and Austria, whose armies dismembered its territory, literally erasing Poland from the map for more than a century.