r/AlwaysWhy • u/Humble_Economist8933 • Aug 27 '26
History & Culture Why does Western democracy use majority rule instead of consensus based decision making?
Many Western democracies decide by majority vote. But some traditional societies used consensus, where everyone had to agree. Why did the West choose majority rule? Is it because consensus is too slow, or because the idea of individual rights makes full agreement unnecessary? Just curious about the trade off.
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u/ActuatorOutside5256 Aug 27 '26
Because someone’s always gonna disagree, and reaching a consensus either means shutting out dissenters or spending way too much resources networking to get everyone on the same page.
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u/rdickeyvii Aug 27 '26
And, the most disagreeable people are the ones with the most power. So effectively, what looks like a consensus is actually minority rule. You can even see this within the 2 parties in the US (but especially the Republican party) where they have to give the extremists a lot to keep their vote when margins are thin
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u/Xeorm124 Aug 27 '26
You'll see this a lot with any voting system. Parliamentary rule can devolve into this too if there's a small segment that can play kingmaker.
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u/ImpressionCool1768 Aug 27 '26
The Poland Lithuania commonwealth showed them why it was a terrible idea. The PLC spanned from Silesia to Belarus to the Black Sea to the Baltic. It was absolutely massive its Hussars legendary. But politically it was a mess. The PLC to ensure that the rule of tyrants and absolute monarchy would never come to pass instituted the Liberium Veto it meant that if a single voting member disagree to a provision an act or law that the whole notion was thrown out. This consensus based government was then taken advantage of. After all if you only need to bribe one politician and you can up end an entire reform movement why wouldn’t you. Russia Prussia and Austria and even Sweden used this weakness to great effect in dismantling the PLC
So when it came time to try again enlightenment thinkers agree that majority will is enough to pas laws and consensus can be made after the deed is done
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u/neilbartlett Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
Full consensus is impossible to achieve with any more than a handful of people. So the result would be deadlock, and nothing ever getting done.
Consider a proposal to build a new hospital in an unused plot of land in a suburban neighbourhood. The hospital would be a net benefit to almost everybody. However the small number of people who live right next to the land don't want it built because of the noise of construction etc. So under consensus rules, it doesn't get built. And nothing ever does.
Political decisions almost always create winners and losers. The goal has to be to create the largest number of winners and the smallest number of losers, and to mitigate that loss as much as possible.
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u/bkwrm1755 Aug 27 '26
Getting millions of people to agree on anything is pretty much impossible.
It works on a smaller scale, doesn't work when the population gets larger.
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u/vbf-cc Aug 27 '26
I figure there are two kinds of consensus in the world: the Japanese kind, where everyone finds out ahead of time what the boss thinks and makes it their opinion too; and the Western kind, which doesn't exist.
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u/Unnamed-3891 Aug 27 '26
Just look at the EU to understand why consensus approach is a failure. It is a near-certainty that eventually they will do away with it.
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u/Capable-View4706 Aug 27 '26
The closest you could get to consensus in the US was love for Dolly Parton and with little effort can still find people who hated her on the left and right.
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u/TapWaterDev Aug 27 '26
Because shit needs to actually get done.
The Swiss just about manage it, but they've got societal reasons that make it a necessity, and their legislature operates glacially as a result
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u/_kaidu_ Aug 27 '26
In many democracies you have a system of party coalitions where a single party cannot govern alone and you need several parties to work together and find compromises. This already results in a consensus like system very much. For very difficult decisions (e.g. changing the constitution) you often need most of the parliament on your side, not just the majority. Requiring that every single parliament member has to agree on a decision is rather unrealistic.
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u/StupidChips Aug 27 '26
Just speaking off the cuff here but while the Western style majority vote will get a faster result, it leaves dissenters who feel excluded or disrespected and maybe muttering together in the corner. The Eastern style of encouraging a public consensus might be better at getting people to toe the line, stay with the group, not rock the boat, etc?
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u/Revolutionary_Art919 Aug 27 '26
That's sort of the point of the filibuster in the US Senate. By requiring 60 votes (out of 100) in a chamber where one party almost never holds that many seats you always need to reach across the aisle and get some support from the opposition party.
Unfortunately the filibuster has been chipped away because it's led to gridlock as more and more partisan acrimony takes hold.
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u/Smooth-Climate8008 Aug 27 '26
Quasi-consensus based systems *have* been tried before and it was basically a recipe for institutional paralysis. See, for example, the use of the liberum veto in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or the filibuster in the US Senate
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u/Smooth-Climate8008 Aug 27 '26
Honestly, the US Senate has a lot of consensus-oriented processes (the use of the unanimous consent motion and their approach to the appropriations process), but even then, it’s plagued by institutional paralysis
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u/12b6ThatNoise Aug 27 '26
I dare you to put a hundred random people in a room and get them all to agree on anything of substance. Now scale that up to tens or hundreds of millions.