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- [00:01]
Daniel Ziblatt
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:06]
Nick
Welcome to the People Power Politics podcast, brought to you by cedar, the center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. Great. Okay. Well, thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of the People Power Politics podcast. And this is a great one today because we are joined by two superstars of the democracy space, Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Stephen is the David Rockefeller professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government Director of the David Rockefeller center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. Daniel is director of the Minde Gunsberg center for European Studies at Harvard University, where he's also Eton professor of Government. And many of you will know him already as the authors of two very important books, Tyranny of the Minority and How Democracies Die. Guys, it's really fantastic to have you on the podcast today.
- [00:58]
Stephen Levitsky
Thanks for having us, Nick.
- [00:59]
Nick
Now, we're here to discuss a particular paper you've put out in the Journal of Democracy called when should the Majority Rule? And I love this paper because if, like we do, you give a lot of talks about democracy, one of the questions you're going to get at some point from the audience is why shouldn't the majority be able to do whatever it wants? Isn't that democracy? But I'm interested in what made you interested in writing this piece and in particular at this kind of moment in world history. What was the backstory?
- [01:24]
Stephen Levitsky
Well, the backstory comes as you know, Nick, neither of us is a scholar of US Politics, of American politics, but our most recent book, Tyranny of the Minority, really focuses centrally on what has gone wrong in the United States. And in researching that book, we realized that maybe an undergraduate student of American politics would already know. But as comparativist, it took us a little while to catch up, we realized just what an outlier the United States is institutionally in terms of the excessive sort of number of counter majoritarian institutions and the excessive degree of counter majoritarianism. Just for example, the United States is the only presidential democracy where the loser of the popular vote can actually win the presidency. It's got one of the most malapportioned upper chambers in the democratic world. It's one of the very few democracies where Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure on the court and on and on. So part of the argument that we make in Tyranny the minority is that the excessive protection of partisan minorities is part of the problem in the United States. And that's what got us interested in this debate of sort of what is the proper balance between, between majority rule and counter majoritarian protections. It's often assumed, at least in the United States, that Madison and his colleagues found the right balance. But there's accumulating evidence to the contrary.
- [02:55]
Nick
And what are some of the consequences of getting that wrong? I mean, maybe before we talk about the right balance, we should talk about what are the consequences of enabling those kind of majoritarian forces. So I guess for some of us we would say, look, in a sense, of course you're not allowing the majority to have it. Say the majority might get frustrated, that might have a legitimate legitimacy issue. But on the other hand, you're creating a more balanced system. You're preventing radical change. There are sort of positives here as well. What for you are the particularly negative things. And I think readers will be particularly, or listeners will be really interested in why you sort of link that to what's happened in the United States rather than, as it were, kind of the other way around.
- [03:33]
Daniel Ziblatt
Yeah. So I think there's a couple of ways in which these institutions, this particular setup, has a feedback effect on our politics, which distorts it and in some ways poisons our politics. An underappreciated way. You mentioned one which is that if you have a political system that repeatedly doesn't deliver on what clear majorities want or institutions that make it incredibly hard for majorities to get their way, then that this does create problems of legitimacy and it creates frustration. And in some ways this maybe helps fuel popular sentiment. But a second point that we make is that our system is, it's the kind of intersection of this system, which is a very old system, and demographic changes that have come both to the United States and to Western Europe, where this is a system that has always protected rural areas for most of our history and that is it's given outsized weight to rural areas. But what's happened over the last hundred years is as urban areas have become more and more, not only populated, but also more and more liberal and rural areas are more conservative. What this means is that these overrepresented rural areas also mean that there's an over representation of one particular party in our two party system, the Republican Party. And so this creates an uneven playing field where these institutions which were designed before they were even political parties. The Constitution doesn't even mention the word political party. So it was not designed to protect particular political parties, now makes it easier for one party to win power than the other party. So it's an uneven playing field, which is a problem for democracy. Then the final thing I would say is that this then in turn has a third impact, which is also particularly pernicious and which is that it makes it, since it's easier for one party to win the presidency, to win the Senate, and thereby also control the court system than the other, that you can actually win power without winning majorities. And the genius of democracy is that it's a self correcting system where you, if you don't win power, you have to figure out, okay, what did I do wrong in this election? Go back moderate, come up with a new agenda. But because that only works for one side, what this means is that particular for the Republican Party in the United States, the party is able to win power as it has the presidency, as it has throughout the 21st century, often without winning majorities. And this means that the party can radicalize as it has without the kind of self correcting logic of our constitutional system to kick in. So the party over and over has lost the majority but won power. And instead of saying, well, wait, we've done something wrong, as it happens in other systems, the party continues to double down on its radicalization. And this radicalization of the Republican Party is one of the things that has brought our system to the dangerous spot that it's in.
- [06:09]
Nick
Thanks. Now, lest we create the impression among our listeners that you're arguing for unfettered majoritarianism, of course, in the paper you actually make a very strong argument that certain forms of counter majority measures are really important. What's the really strong case for them? And what are the things that you come down on as being essential for any political system to protect? What, whether the majority wants to get rid of it or not?
- [06:32]
Stephen Levitsky
Yeah. One of the principal motivations for writing this piece is we perceive, at least in US political discourse, a kind of conflation of all kinds of majoritarian institutions. All kind of majoritarian institutions are seen as essential to our democracy, whether it's the electoral College or the filibuster or the Bill of Rights. And there's a really basic point that when you think about it, seems pretty obvious but just hadn't been made, which is that there are some kind of majoritarian institutions that are clearly essential for any liberal democracy and others that are much more debatable and perhaps even quite antithetical to democracy. So part of the article makes an effort to really clarify which counter majoritarian institutions we think are essential and which ones are not. So there are two types of counter majoritarian institutions that we consider essential. One are rules protecting basic civil liberties and civil rights. Now people will disagree at the margins about which civil liberties are essential. But most of us agree that right to free speech, free press, association, assembly, conscience, are basic individual rights that no majority should under any circumstance be able to threaten. So individual civil liberties in the US case enshrined in the Bill of Rights, are essential. The second, maybe slightly less prominent type of counter majoritarian institution that we think is essential to democracy are those that sustain the basic rules of the game. It should not be possible for one political faction or one political party to unilaterally change the rules of the game, which is why constitutional reform or constitutional amendment should always require super majority. That that is an essential counter majoritarian institution. So one place where some democracies get into trouble is where it's simply too easy for a single party to unilaterally change the rules of the game. In fact, many of the recent crises that we've seen in Hungary, in Israel, recently in Mexico are because a single party it was too easy to change the political rules of the game. So constitutions should be hard to perform. That's another area of essential counter majoritarian institutions. We then go on to discuss counter majoritarian institutions that we think are not essential and sometimes antithetical, and those are institutions that prevent majorities from winning elections. We think that there is no theory of democracy that justifies anything other than the party that wins the most votes should win office. And second, legislation elected majorities should govern obviously as long as they govern within the Constitution and, and respect individual liberties. The super majority rules, rules that allow partisan or legislative minorities to permanently, to repeatedly and permanently thwart legislative majorities, we think are also quite antithetical to democracy. So two institutions in particular that we find antithetical to democracy in the United States are the Electoral College, which permits the loser of a popular vote to win the presidency, which I think is indefensible under any democratic theory, and the Senate filibuster, which allows partisan minorities to thwart partisan majorities even for regular legislation. So those are two types of counter majoritarian institutions we think are not essential and actually quite antithetical democracy.
- [10:20]
Daniel Ziblatt
Let me just add here for a second. I mean, so we quote a famous Supreme Court decision by Justice Jackson written back in the 1940s, where he to illustrate this point that Steve just made, which is that in that decision he was defending a religious liberty. What he said is there's certain things that are beyond that should be beyond the reach of any majority, beyond the reach of majorities, and those are the protection of civil liberties. And the democratic process. And what we add to that is to say, well, that while that's true, there are certain things that ought to be beyond the reach of majorities. There are certain things that need to be within the reach of majorities in order for democracy to to count as a democracy. And those are the second two things that Steve mentioned, elections and legislative processes.
- [11:00]
Nick
So I guess that brings us to a good test case. And perhaps the best test case right now is the US Case which you wrote about in your last book. On the one hand, we have a president whose critics are saying he's acting beyond the Constitution, but it's not always clear exactly which bit of the Constitution he's breaking when people say that, but that they say he's going too far in terms of the use of the powers, et cetera. But on the other hand, at the minute, mainly in terms of the legislative agenda, appears to have the support of Congress and won the last election. Where do you come down on whether this is a kind of within your book, whether you might like the policies or not, a kind of form of majoritarianism that is acceptable within democracy or a form of majoritarianism that goes over the bounds of what is acceptable and what should be permitted?
- [11:53]
Stephen Levitsky
I don't think the principal problem today is either excessive or insufficient majoritarianism. I think there is a connection which I'll make in a second. But this is primarily the election of a radicalized party that has ceased to be committed to democracy. And when you elect to power an authoritarian political party, and I hate to say it, but that's where the Republican Party is. When you elect to power an authoritarian political party, that's going to be a threat to democracy, no matter what your constitutional design. So this is not what we face right now is a serious threat to democracy that's not principally about constitutional design. That said, as Daniel alluded a couple of minutes ago, our counter majoritarian institutions, which have empowered, protected and empowered a radicalized Republican Party now for the better part of the 21st century, contributed in multiple ways to the problem we had. Now it is absolutely the case that Trump won the popular vote in 2024 and that the Republicans won the House and won the Senate, but Trump never would have been president in the first place without the Electoral College. And if we had a system akin to to most democracies, where the popular vote determines who wins the presidency and the popular vote determines the majority in the Senate, we would have because the US President and the Senate nominate and confirm the Supreme Court, we would have a 6.3Liberal majority in the Supreme Court today, if we simply had basic majority rule for the presidency and the Senate in 2016, very quickly, the loser of the presidential vote wins the presidency, and the party that wins fewer votes in the popular vote for Senate wins control of the Senate. That president and that Senate between 2016 and 2020 go on to nominate and confirm three Supreme Court justices. Again, we would have, if we just had majority rule, presidency in the senate, we'd have a 6. 3 liberal majority in the Supreme Court. And history would have turned out very differently, perhaps in terms of interpreting the 14th Amendment and Trump's legal ability to run for president, certainly in terms of the ruling that Trump is immune for prosecution for virtually any behavior while in office. And the Senate may well have convicted Trump in 2021 if we had anything remotely proportional, a Senate that was proportionate to the population. So Trump's original election in 2016, his ability to be acquitted by the US Congress despite having attempted to overturn an election, and then the dramatic expansion of his maneuver by supreme court rulings in 2024, all of those things are clear and direct products of counter majoritarianism. Go ahead.
- [14:49]
Daniel Ziblatt
Yeah, no, just to add to that. I mean, that's sort of the history of how we ended up here. But I think there's two further ways that these institutions are implicated in the current moment, and that is right now, we don't quite know what the state of American democracy is. Seems to be facing serious challenges. But the one area where there do seem to be some constraints are the court system, the federal court system, because the federal circuit court judges have intervened to block things that many people regard as unconstitutional. But that's just a kind of temporary moment because very quickly these things will make their way onto the Supreme Court. And whether or not the Supreme Court sides with Trump on these things or not and how he responds to that will be, at the end of the day, the sort of crucial moment where we see how stable the American democratic constitutional structure is. And if the court ends up allowing Trump to proceed, and a lot of these things that lots of people regard as unconstitutional, this will be due to that counter majoritarian structure. So that is a very live issue. That's the first way. Second thing that why these institutions kind of affect our moment is that there's a sort of low expectations for Republicans. I mean, Republicans are so used to not winning majorities, popular majorities, when they win the White House, that when Trump wins by a point and a half or something, which is the lowest in this 2024 election, which is the closest margin of a presidential victory since 1968. This is regarded as this major triumph and gives Trump and Republicans a sense of a mandate. And so in a certain way, I think our the kind of system, you know, it reminds me of this line that famous Texas governor Ann Richards, a Democrat, was criticizing George Bush Senior when he was running for president and saying, you know, George Bush Sr. Was this is a baseball metaphor. So I hope your listeners know a bit about baseball. Poor George Bush Sr. Was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. I mean, the Republicans win by a point and a half and think they have this major mandate and that's because they're used to winning power without any majority. So they now think they have these incredible Democratic mandate. And I think that again, in any other kind of system you say, well, this is this really close margin. So I think that kind of contributes to the crisis that we're in.
- [16:58]
Nick
That brings me on to a question I wanted to ask, which is I think the conceptual distinction you provide is really useful. I'm sure this is going to be cited by a lot of people. But it also raises the question for us about how do you actually respond practically. Right. So in other words, my question is this is a really valuable thing to know, but can we actually use it to mobilize? Can we use it to strengthen political systems? In other words, we've got a lot of ships in the world that are floating. We're trying to fix those ships while they're on the water. We don't have time to take them out and put them on the dry dock. Is it feasible to generate the kind of consensus you would need within a society to, to actually make some of these constitutional changes? And is it perhaps likely in the moment that we're in that the risk is that the changes that we see will be almost all reducing the counter majoritarian measures and not strengthening some of the ones that you talk about where they actually valuable and necessary. So it'd be really interesting to hear your sense on what is the feasibility of constitutional reform, political system reform in the sorts of countries that you look at the. But also do you get the sense that at the minute the risk is that it's going to be the wrong kind of reform rather than the right kind of reform?
- [18:11]
Daniel Ziblatt
I would say that each democracy has different ailments. So I would certainly not prescribe more majoritarianism to a country like Israel that doesn't have a written constitution, that's a unicamen law system. I wouldn't prescribe more majoritarianism to Hungary, where it's very easy to change the constitution and it suffered actually from too much majoritarianism. So every democracy there's many ways for democracies to be ill. And the American system is kind of on the other end of the spectrum where it has a lot of counter majoritarian institutions. So we're not suggesting that there's a kind of one size fits all set of reforms. What we're doing in this essay rather is to provide a kind of benchmark or a yardstick against which people who want to carry out reforms and actually people who want to carry out reforms for pernicious reasons, claiming that they are democrats. I mean, that's really in some ways part of the point. People who say, oh, we need more majoritarianism because that's democracy, you know, we can actually say, well actually what kind of majoritarianism are you talking about? Or people say we need more counter majoritarianism to protect our democracy. You know, if it's about making it so that somebody can win power without winning majorities, then we can say, hey, wait a second, that's not, according to Levitsky and Ziblatt, that's not democratic. So we're providing a set of benchmarks that we hope people can take up to help arm democrats, people who are really committed to democracy, both to kind of regulate their own assessments of when reforms are actually democratic or not, and also as a way of criticizing those who want to carry out reforms in the name of democracy.
- [19:42]
Stephen Levitsky
Right. Just to put some cases on Daniel's excellent point, measures in Thailand over the last decade in which unelected bodies contribute to the election of a prime minister. So thwarting parliamentary majorities in the election of a prime minister is a clear example of a counter majoritarian institution that we would call antithetical to democracy. Israel's effort that Netanyahu government's effort unilateral to use a bare majority in the Knesset to change fundamental rules of the political game regarding the judiciary is another example of a wrong headed or, or democracy threatening constitutional reform. If I could say a couple other very quick points in terms of reform. We've thought a lot about this in the US case, I agree 100% with Daniel that every case is different. Cases are arrayed on a wide spectrum in terms of the degree of kind of majoritarianism. So the degree of majoritarianism, the dose of authoritarianism needed in country acts, is going to be very different from country Y because the US is so far arrayed on one end of the counter majoritarian spectrum. We make a case, and we do so in our book Tyranny the Minority, for a set of what we call democratizing reforms that would shift the United States from excessive counter majoritarianism to a degree of counter majoritarianism more akin to other established democracies. Your point that the conditions for achieving such reform right now are really non existent? I think that's right. But the United States over the last generation or two as a society, has just sort of forgotten how to improve our political system. We forgot. We, after spending a couple centuries engaged in constant debates about how to make our political system better and more democratic, we kind of stopped in the 1970s. And at this point, all living adults have grown up in an era where we treat the Constitution as something that's only to be observed beneath glass and is not to be touched and is treated as sacred, which we think is profoundly debilitating for a democracy. Every democracy needs to be open to reform. So our intention in the US case is simply to open up or contribute to a public debate about constitutional reform, because the US is still seen, obviously much less so than in the past, but the US is still seen as a model. I think it's important to engage in a public debate about are electoral colleges really worthwhile? Is a malapportioned Senate of the same value today that was in the 18th and 19th century? That's a US debate, but it's one that has implications for other democracies.
- [22:35]
Nick
Absolutely. And I just want to make the point there that I think that's why it's really good to have people like yourselves who come to the US but from different area studies or different historical focus. And then you get, as you say, as you said, I think you said this right at the beginning. All of a sudden you start looking at comparative cases and you say, hang on, actually the US doesn't look like other countries. And we often have this conversation, right? The Supreme Court in the US is a bit distinctive relative to other cases. And then also with that historical perspective, you're also able to say, hang on, we weren't doing what we're doing now 100 years ago. In a way, this is the exception rather than the norm. And that different set of perspectives which you perhaps generate when you come with fresh eyes, I think is actually one of the really valuable things about your book, but also about this article. We're running out of time now, and I know that one thing listeners will want to sort of have a sense of is the positive as well as the negative. So we talked there about some of the really classic bad examples, Thailand, etc. We talked about some of your concerns about the US is there a country out there that you can point us to where you think the balance is pretty right? There's the right kind of majority measures. The sort of bad ones have actually been removed or don't exist. Where kind of sometimes in the past people have talked about, what is it getting to Denmark? Where are we trying to get to in terms of the right institutional mix for this particular issue?
- [23:50]
Daniel Ziblatt
Yeah, well, we've learned a lot about how to write constitutions since the 18th century when the US Constitution was written. And so just as in all facets of life, there's been an increase in knowledge and a lot of improvement. So a lot of the constitutions written after 1945 are, I think, superior. I think the German Constitution is one particular kind of relevant model for the US because it's a federal system, but combines that with a proportional representation electoral system, which is something we haven't mentioned, which in a kind of interesting way actually helps. It makes it easier to build majority governments through coalition governments. It's first past the post plural systems like the UK has and the United States have, that actually make it much harder to. Are much easier to have kind of manufactured majority governments where you get these distortions, where, you know, sometimes even a party that doesn't win a majority, the votes can win a majority of the seats, or there's this kind of disproportionality that you often see in the uk. So any system in Western Europe that has a proportional representation system, you know, that has, they have their own downsides. I mean, no system is perfect, but there are ways in which they are superior, I would say, to the first past the post system. Another point I would make though is that other. I mean, it's not, it's not only as if, you know, if you built a constitution after 1945, you're on safe ground. And if you have an old one, you're in trouble because actually there's another constitution that we write about both in the article and in our book, the Norwegian Constitution, which is the world's second oldest written constitution after the United States.
- [25:18]
Stephen Levitsky
So it's getting to Norway, not getting to Denmark.
- [25:20]
Daniel Ziblatt
Yeah, which was the, you know, which is a constitution that was highly undemocratic, you know, much more undemocratic back in the early 19th century than the US but just simply partly because the constitution was easier to change over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, especially the 20th century, it's been amended so many times that today Norway is, you know, ranked by every international index as the most democratic country in the world. And, you know, there's lots of other differences between Norway and the United States. We're not naive to that. But point part of the reason is that the Constitution's been improved over time and it's, you know, it's a proportional representation system. It's also, you know, unitary system. So there are other differences. But it's in large part just because it's easier to amend the Constitution that today I think Norway's democracy has a much safer ground than America's.
- [26:10]
Stephen Levitsky
I would say just, you know, four institutions that emerged in the world after their passage of the U.S. constitution that seem worth taking seriously in the United States. Daniel mentioned one, proportional representation. A second one is not only constitutional voting rights, which actually the right to vote doesn't exist in the US Constitution, but a set of measures that facilitate access to the ballot that just never developed in the United States didn't exist in the 18th century, but democracies have learned how to make it easy to register and vote. A third is term limits on the Supreme Court, which seems pretty, pretty straightforward. And the fourth is direct presidential elections. That's a 19th century, 19th to 20th century invention that I think the US would benefit from. So it's important, very important to point out that these sorts of reforms and maybe making a system slightly more majoritarian, is hardly a panacea for democracies. There are many reasons why contemporary democracies, even Norway, are suffering a range of ills now that have nothing to do with majoritarianism or counter majoritarianism. And democrats, small D democrats, are going to have to think about institutional innovations that go beyond what we saw in the 20th century in Europe, although those were important democratizing advances. But the challenges ahead of us extend way beyond simply dealing with excessive majoritarians.
- [27:40]
Nick
I think that's a great message on which to end a gauntlet throw down that hopefully others will pick up. Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a real pleasure. You've been listening to Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Ziblack. The article is called when should the Majority Rule? And you can find it on Journal of Democracy right now. Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by cedar, the center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our center and the exciting work that we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter Cedarbham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.