| Summary/Abstract |
The Founding Fathers conceived formal counter-majoritarian restrictions
aimed specifically to “render the majority unable”: to prevent the majority from
trampling on minorities in the U.S. democratic system. This article contends that
several such formal restrictions actually fail to protect contemporary minorities as the founders imagined they would. Indeed, counter-majority restrictions embedded
in the Electoral College, the Senate, and the judicial review may actually prohibit
such protection. Using a comparative politics approach, this article builds
on theoretical arguments and data that evaluate democratic functionality and
fairness based on level of social equality provisions as well as optimality of voter
participation. I find that certain counter-majoritarian procedures are empirically
linked to higher inequality levels across twenty-one advanced democracies. This
political suboptimality is reflected in a significant correlation between higher Gini
coefficients and majoritarian systems (with the United States in first place) in the
sample and also between lower scores and consensus democracies. I argue that
comparative analysis shows that some criticisms hitherto only leveled at the United
States are present in an entire family of systems—the majoritarian ones—which
begs significant critical questioning of the impact of institutional design on the
effectiveness of social policies and inclusive democratic procedures.
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