Majority rule and minority rights are important values in a democracy. The balance between them, often reflected in the size of the majority required for a decision, is a central issue in the making of constitutions, motivates the design of key features of legislative institutions and parliamentary rules, and regularly figures in cases before courts. Unfortunately, the social sciences have very limited understanding of how the public weighs majority rule and minority rights.
This research examines public attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in the United States. It does so by focusing on public views about prominent legislative battles involving the Senate filibuster - extended debate intended to prevent a vote. The Senate's cloture rule provides that a three-fifths majority of elected senators is required to close debate and move to a vote on a motion, a rule that allows a large minority to prevent majority action. This study exploits an existing survey panel to assess the public's views of majority rule and minority rights both in the abstract and in response to major legislative episodes. The study examines the effect of abstract views of majority rule, minority rights, and the filibuster, policy preferences, party preferences and other factors such as political sophistication and education on evaluations of legislative outcomes involving the filibuster.
This research engages several students as research assistants, which will create an opportunity for the students to become more deeply involved in survey research, attend professional meetings, and collaborate in writing research reports. The findings will be reflected in on the investigator's textbook on congressional politics, which is one of the most widely-read textbooks by undergraduates on the subject. The investigators are frequent speakers before civic and academic groups, frequent guests on radio and television programs, and frequent consultants to legislatures, all of which are forums in which the public's understanding of majority rule, minority rights, and congressional procedure is frequently an issue. By working with the Weidenbaum Center, the research findings will be incorporated in non-technical publications and distributed to a large general audience
Political science has long been interested in the development and distribution of democratic values in the U.S. and elsewhere. A commitment to certain procedural principles, such as self-governance and majority rule, is considered essential to the legitimacy of law and public policy and the stability of modern democracies. Central to these values are majority rule and minority rights. In constitutions and parliamentary rules, majority rule and minority rights are in tension, and often are the subject of political argument and reform efforts. No previous study of Americans' democratic values measured either preferences for majority rule and minority rights as general principles or preferences about the application of majority rule and minority rights for a specific institution. This study measured the stability of attitudes of the Senate filibuster practice during an important legislative episode, the 2009 health care reform debate. Filibuster attitudes were related to more abstract attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, and inferences were drawn about the importance of those attitudes for evaluations of the parties and vote intention for the 2010 elections. The study found that filibuster attitudes change in ways predicted by respondents’ partisan and policy preferences. Moreover, controlling for party identification, ideology, policy views, and attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in the abstract, filibuster attitudes have modest, asymmetric effects on party evaluations but no effect on vote intention. The study demonstrates the importance of panel designs for the evaluation of attitudinal effects of important stimuli in the social or political environment. A cross-sectional perspective would have produced a misleading account of the way procedural attitudes influence evaluations of parties and elites. Several social sciences address the development and effects of values on behavior and institutions. This study contributes to this line of theory and research by demonstrating the limited and conditional commitment to procedural principles, even among relatively sophisticated members of the American general public.
