The Wiggle Room of Majority Rule

Abstract

A majority of votes is necessary but not sufficient for legitimate collective decisions. Rather, the legitimacy of majority rule procedures are bounded by the perceptual biases of citizens, both warranted and unwarranted, in ways that systematically deviates from an absolute view of majority rule. In this article, we explore these bounds and its real-world implications by running a series of survey experiments with EU membership referendums as a case of majority rule. The experiments are embedded in representative surveys in six European countries (N= 17,956). We find, first, that there are two dimensions of majority. The margin of votes in favor and the level of the turnout. Different combinations of vote margin and turnout has different levels of acceptability, conditional on the context of the referendum. Second, we find a status quo bias, where it takes more to accept unwanted change than unwanted status quo.