An ambiguous toolof demos accountability: taking the metaphorical concept of majoritarian tyranny seriously

Abstract

Even before the invention of modern democracy, political theorists have warned about the dangers of ‘majoritarian tyrannies.’ While the concept has been perennially suspicious of serving as an antidemocratic stratagem, I propose to revalue it as an antipopulist tool of horizontal accountability among citizens (‘demos accountability’). Subverting the populist narrative of popular unity and virtue, it allows aggrieved minorities to call their majoritarian fellow citizens to account for the injustices they help to produce. Given its metaphorical quality, however, its rootedness in the image of the personal tyrant, the idea of majoritarian tyranny carries deep democratic ambiguities. To recognize these ambiguities, I argue, we need to resist the suggestive power of its animating metaphor and take the empirical complexities of its logical building blocks seriously: the exercise of tyranny, the exclusive targeting of minorities, and collective action by the majority. My stepwise analytical reconstruction of these three constitutive elements of majoritarian tyrannies reveals two metaphorical pitfalls that threaten the democratic fertility of the concept: its vilifying and its simplifying assumptions.