Minoritarianism Is Everywhere
For the last few years, American public intellectuals have sounded the alarm about a new disease infecting the body politic: minoritarianism. According to political scientists, conservatives around the world are facing serious demographic threats to their competitiveness. In many cases, their attempts to moderate have been met with populist revolts that splintered the right; in others, the right has unified around a strategy that combines unpopular positions with voter suppression, institutional hardball, crackdowns on civil society, threats of violence, and an embrace of authoritarian strongmen. The Republican Party under Donald Trump is part of this pattern of democratic backsliding. It must be confronted, the argument goes, by a cross-partisan defense of majoritarian, democratic politics that can prevent Republicans from ruling the rest of the country from an illegitimately narrow voting base.
Terms like "minoritarianism," "democratic backsliding," and "authoritarian populism" have provided the lingua franca for a broad movement of democracy-oriented organizations and programs at major philanthropies. This framework has also filtered down to the messaging and prioritization of the Democratic Party, which returned to it like a moth to a flame during the most recent campaign. They did so despite the fact that major figures within the party warned that it was distracting from what most voters actually cared about. Governor Jared Polis of Colorado, to take just one example, argued back in February 2024, "Democrats can't just be the party of protecting liberal democracy....That's not the top voting issue for most Americans."
Last November's election results should raise questions not only about minoritarianism discourse's political potency, but about whether it is true. Republicans won an electoral majority and a popular plurality for the first time in two decades, and they did so without much, if any, violence or election suppression of consequence. Despite Donald Trump's persistent falsehoods about the 2020 election and indications he would not accept another loss, it turns out the GOP was able to win the ordinary way. Attacking the failures of Democratic governance, drawing on a global trend of anti-incumbency, and targeting a promising demographic — namely non-college-educated men (including a significantly increased share of Hispanic and black men) — turned out to be a viable alternative to minoritarianism. Just as striking, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Christopher Warshaw, and Eric McGhee have shown that Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2024 without any systematic partisan bias due to legislative gerrymandering.
That said, we should not have needed the results of the 2024 election to tell us that there was always something a little off about democracy discourse. It tells a story about American democracy in which the minoritarianism of recent Republican governance is an aberration in an otherwise majoritarian system. In doing so, it flatters the status quo ante of American democratic practice, giving the impression that our challenges can all be laid at the feet of surging populism on the right.
The problem with this account is that almost no one who studies how public policy has been made in the United States over the last half-century would characterize policymaking as mostly majoritarian. In fact, the characteristic feature of the most salient changes in how we make and execute public policy — changes that were driven mostly by the center left over the last 50 years — is that they have made policymaking pervasively less majoritarian.
Scholars from a variety of perspectives have noticed this pattern. Whether one focuses on NIMBYism in housing and infrastructure, the role of public-employee unions in local government, the cloistered boards who control licensed professions, or the governance of institutions of higher education, minoritarianism starts to look like the characteristic form of our government rather than an aberration. Majoritarianism may be a desirable goal for democratic government, but the enemies of majoritarianism are most certainly not just on the right.
In fact, many of the populist right's attacks are not aimed at the left's majoritarianism, but at its most minoritarian manifestations. One does not need to deny that voting restrictions, rural states' magnified power in the Senate, the filibuster, or the outsized role of the Supreme Court pose genuine problems for American democracy. But we should recognize that there is a kind of partiality in only attending to the non-majoritarian aspects of our politics embraced by the right.
Democrats are rightly appalled by the way Republicans have governed since Trump's second inauguration. But if they respond to the administration's anti-constitutional, proto-authoritarian governance with nothing but resistance and critique, they will miss the opportunity to reflect on their own mode of governing. If Democrats want to rebuild state capacity on top of the ruins they will sooner or later inherit from Republicans, they need to think more carefully about what sort of state that should be.
MINORITARIANISM IN LAND AND INFRASTRUCTURE
In search of the tyranny of the minority, one would be well advised to skip over the nation's capital and look instead to the crazy quilt of jurisdictions in which America's decisions about land use and infrastructure development are made. A growing field of scholarship has shown that America's unusually high level of local control over these decisions has led to a crippling undersupply of housing, coupled with dramatically higher costs for transportation and energy projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
Such localism magnifies the influence of highly unrepresentative yet intensely interested groups in institutions with low levels of public participation, leading to dysfunctional governing outcomes. The phenomenon is particularly evident in jurisdictions that support Democrats at the national level. If one of the appeals of populism is the sense that "nothing works anymore," we should take seriously the argument that anti-development minoritarianism might be part of the explanation.
Something dramatic changed in the political economy of housing and infrastructure in the United States starting in the late 1970s. In New York City, as Harvard's Ed Glaeser has shown, housing supply increased in response to elevated housing costs starting in the 1960s, helping to push costs back down in the early 1970s. But starting in the late 1970s, the basic logic of supply and demand broke down entirely, as housing costs skyrocketed without leading to a corresponding increase in supply. Glaeser attributed this shift to what he describes as a reallocation of property rights from owners to "neighbors," who suddenly had a range of ways to participate in development decisions that they had once lacked. A similar pattern, at roughly the same time, occurred in other coastal, mostly Democrat-controlled cities and suburbs. With no place for housing demand to go, prices rapidly spiraled upward.
Beneath the economic effects of these changes lies a profound democratic breakdown. Land-use decisions in the United States may be localized, but they impose significant harms on people who are not already residents of the locality in question.
This is in large part due to extreme participatory inequality. Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer of Boston University have demonstrated that participants in local housing-development decisions tend to be homeowners, who have an overwhelmingly negative view of new housing construction. Their overrepresentation in housing-development debates leads to a pattern of pervasive delays that favor existing residents over potential new residents. This produces a strong bias toward building luxury housing, since only developers who build higher-margin projects can afford to push start dates back indefinitely. The politics of housing in high-cost, mostly Democrat-controlled jurisdictions is, in sum, inescapably minoritarian.
A similar pattern is evident in constructing infrastructure of all kinds. The Transit Costs Project at New York University's Marron Institute has demonstrated that rail infrastructure is consistently more expensive and slower to build in the United States than in most other advanced industrial countries. Economists Leah Brooks and Zachary Liscow have found a similar pattern in the cost of road construction, with the United States experiencing continuously increasing costs since the late 1960s.
America's systematic under-performance in this domain is no secret. Ordinary citizens may not understand the deeper causes of the massive delays and bloated costs of New York City's Second Avenue Subway project, Boston's Big Dig, the ongoing disaster that is California's high-speed rail project, or the comically slow construction of electric-vehicle charging stations authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act. But whether it's Gretchen Whitmer running for governor of Michigan on a platform of "Fix the Damn Roads" or Josh Shapiro trumpeting his eagerness to cut through bureaucratic hurdles to fix I-95 in Pennsylvania, Democratic officials have sensed that infrastructure dysfunction is a thorn in the side of blue-state governance.
While Democratic officials like Whitmer and Shapiro can occasionally disrupt this dysfunction through executive power, they are fighting against a powerful institutional undertow. Brooks and Liscow traced the increase in highway costs since 1970 to the outsized influence of "citizen voice," or concentrated minority interests. Stanford's Michael Bennon and Devon Wilson found that measures taken to comply with and avoid litigation under the National Environmental Policy Act increase infrastructure projects' cost and delay. While each step in the process may seem trivial, even "minor delays can have massive impacts when, for instance, project champions term out of office, or if contract terms expire and need to be repriced, or if municipal budgets are reduced, or if commodity prices change, and so on." When combined with government's degraded capacity to manage large projects internally and subsequent dependence on networks of private contractors and consultants, these added delays generate ubiquitous complexity, waste, and dysfunction.
Anti-development minoritarianism also conflicts with the Democratic Party's economic and climate strategies. Democrats have turned away from addressing climate challenges through carbon pricing and instead embraced the idea of "building our way out of the problem" through green industrial policy. But that strategy's success depends on government's ability to rapidly push through massive investments in low-carbon power sources, energy transmission, public transportation, and housing in an increasingly tight fiscal environment. Green industrial policy is simply incompatible with institutionalized minoritarianism in land use and development. Ironically, the failure to directly attack development minoritarianism during the Biden administration ensured that its most prized legislative accomplishments generated outcomes too late for voters to trace their effects back to the Democrats who voted for them.
MINORITARIANISM IN PUBLIC-SECTOR LABOR
American culture favors a narrative on local government that sees it as the seedbed of democracy. Government "close to the people," the argument goes, is more participatory, less polarized, and less subject to ideological extremes than national government. But this story runs up against some uncomfortable facts.
First, as researchers like David Schleicher, Daniel Hopkins, and Jacob Grumbach have argued, the nationalization of politics has effectively eliminated partisan competition in local government. Schleicher has shown that many cities have "unitary party rules" that effectively allow only the Democratic and Republican brands to appear on the ballot, even though in big cities the Republican brand is often repulsive to enough voters to neutralize the party's political impact. As a result, decisions about who will rule local governing bodies are made in primaries, which attract low levels of voter participation. A recent report by University of Chicago professor Christopher Berry shows that only a fifth to a quarter of citizens participate in mayoral elections in major cities, that turnout in school-board elections is in the single digits, and that participation in special-district elections is even lower. Those who do turn out tend to be whiter, richer, and older than the electorate as a whole.
Participation is exceptionally high, however, for one group in particular: members of public-sector unions. Ordinary citizens' relatively low election-participation rates provide government's own employees with an enormous comparative advantage, as they have the means, motive, and institutional context to exercise disproportionate power over local governing decisions.
Public-sector unions have several critical advantages over other participants in local government. The first is that they take the electoral system in a minoritarian direction by pushing to preserve off-cycle elections, which systematically reduce voter turnout. Sarah Anzia of the University of California, Berkeley, as well as political scientists Adam Dynes, Michael Hartney, and Sam Hayes, have shown that off-cycle elections significantly magnify the power of public-sector unions and other organized interests.
Second, because of their significant material interest in local-government decision-making, public-sector unions have a strong incentive to participate in candidate recruitment, and to inform their members of the relative merits of candidates in elections with relatively low voter information or partisan signaling. Almost by definition, public-sector unions have more knowledge of the issues on which they participate, giving them a greater understanding of the impact that policy changes will have on their members' interests.
Third, critical decisions that affect public-sector unions' interests are made through a process with exceptionally low transparency and participation: collective bargaining. In these negotiations, unions sit on both sides of the table: They represent themselves and, through their outsized participation in elections, help choose those they bargain with. Stanford political scientist Terry Moe has shown that in K-12 education, almost every consequential decision regarding schools — hiring and firing policies, teacher evaluation, class size, the organization of the school day, etc. — is enshrined in teacher contracts rather than ordinary laws. Daniel DiSalvo has argued that almost every feature of disproportionate teacher power also applies to police officers, whose unions are able to use contractual provisions to protect their least effective and most abusive members from discipline.
Public-sector unions have one final advantage over ordinary citizens: They are part of the government. Police officers, teachers, and other local public employees negotiate with those they work alongside every day. Especially in small jurisdictions, these can be very intimate relationships.
All of these advantages have a major impact on local government's responsiveness to its constituents more broadly. A wide range of scholarship shows that greater public-sector-union power is correlated with larger unfunded pension obligations, which make it more difficult for governments to invest in programs and projects that benefit everyone. More recently, school districts subject to stronger teachers' unions had longer delays in reopening during the Covid-19 pandemic, despite evidence that lengthy school closures did not have significant positive public-health effects. Public-sector unions also use their power to insist on disciplinary restrictions that make schools and police departments difficult to manage.
Reasonable people can disagree about the value of public-sector unions. There is no doubt, however, that they benefit from and help entrench the minoritarianism of local politics at the expense of majoritarian democracy.
MINORITARIANISM AMONG REGULATORY PROFESSIONALS
The structure of American law leads to a peculiar form of lawmaking. Weak party discipline and congressional individualism make it exceptionally difficult for lawmakers to construct coalitions. Legislators under these conditions have strong incentives to avoid blame. Thus the laws they write have become increasingly vague, often delegating significant lawmaking authority to executive agencies. Having been passed the legislative buck, those agencies in turn transfer a great degree of rulemaking responsibility to professional organizations, whose members fill in the details with codes of "best practice" behind closed doors.
These successive delegations of power to experts give them a comparatively large influence over policy development, providing what Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin has called the "strength of a weak state" in an otherwise anti-statist culture. These delegations also mean that many economically and morally controversial debates are driven by the often idiosyncratic material incentives and normative preferences of professions rather than anything that looks like majoritarian democracy.
The classic study of this pattern is Dobbin's and John Sutton's work on civil rights. They show that the vagueness of American civil-rights law led to the creation of compliance divisions inside firms, which were themselves connected to new professional organizations that provided "best practices" to those divisions regarding compliance with the law. That policy-development process expanded as non-discrimination evolved into DEI, with new layers of professional organizations and consultants developing additional practices and norms, usually without any shift in the underlying legislative framework. Political scientists Jeb Barnes and Thomas Burke have shown that there are similar dynamics at work in disability law, where large organizations (like universities and businesses) create compliance divisions connected to professional organizations that encourage them to go "beyond compliance."
Shep Melnick has documented nearly the same process at work in Title IX compliance. Over time, universities have given the statute — a classically vague piece of congressional lawmaking that protects women from sex-based discrimination in education — progressively more ambitious interpretations in areas as disparate as the range of intercollegiate sports available for men and women, the treatment of transgender individuals, and the adjudication of claims of sexual abuse. None of these changes were driven by majoritarian legislative processes. Instead, Melnick shows that changing norms and practices of professions acting within universities, in conjunction with supportive federal administrative agencies, played a key role in deciding when and how Title IX would be applied.
Government has also expanded indirect rule in the area of human-subjects review, which, as historian Zachary Schrag has shown, covers not just the narrow domain of biomedical and behavioral subjects originally envisioned when Congress passed legislation on the issue in 1974, but the entirety of the social sciences. By requiring universities to create institutional-review boards (IRBs) to make decisions about human-subject research without giving them clear guidance about what constitutes such research or how it should be controlled, Congress created the conditions for these divisions to grow within universities and expand the fields associated with them. As a result, the United States now operates what is effectively a system of prior restraint in university research through the indirect and democratically unauthorized rule of private accrediting boards and associations that provide professional, rather than electoral, legitimation.
A final and quite terrifying example of what amounts to private governance through professions is professional licensing. Vast parts of the American economy — especially medicine, dentistry, and the law, but increasingly other occupations as well — are governed by licensing boards. In fact, approximately one-fifth of workers have jobs that require a professional license. As Rebecca Haw Allensworth showed in her recent book The Licensing Racket, most of these boards exercise an extraordinary degree of authority with little state oversight. The key decision-makers on these boards are, unsurprisingly, members of those occupations themselves, who not only get to decide whom to allow into the profession and whom to exclude (or remove), but are given a great deal of discretion over what is actually licensed. A recent Supreme Court case, North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission, found that a dental board was effectively acting as a private institution, albeit clothed with public power, when it tried to render illegal the practice of teeth whitening outside of dentists' offices.
Despite the claim that these boards are necessary to provide expert governance over highly technical fields, Allensworth found that in practice, they systematically protect their members against occupational entry, thereby facilitating higher prices. In addition, they regularly fail to remove members who have engaged in heinous abuses of authority. Doctors who were repeatedly found to have run pill mills that massively overprescribed oxycodone were spared professional discipline at a time when holding them accountable could have provided a first line of defense against the addiction epidemic that is now a major public-health challenge. This massive governance failure can be traced back to the fact that doctors themselves, rather than anything approximating majoritarian democracy, govern medical practice.
In field after field, the United States now operates a system of delegated, effectively private governance through the transfer of power to professional organizations. Despite wielding extraordinary power, these organizations are in almost all cases given relatively little operational oversight. The ongoing influence of majorities is nowhere to be seen. What's more, the scope of their control tends to increase year by year. IRBs and offices of institutional equity relentlessly expand in their personnel and workload, while licensing boards continually seize control of new occupations. This may or may not be good policy, but it is far from majoritarian.
MAJORITARIANISM OR PLURALIST MINORITARIANISM?
This essay may seem excessively critical of what we might call "liberal governance," especially at a moment when it's under unprecedented siege in Washington. But this is precisely the moment when those of us who believe in activist government need to ask fundamental questions about its institutional form. If and when Democrats regain power, the instinct to put things back the way they were will be strong. We must resist it.
Democrats should take seriously the democratic deficit in the modern administrative state, which in recent years has been obscured by their focus on Republican minoritarianism. Democrats should take majoritarianism either as a normative critique of their own mode of governance or reconsider it as a master principle of political legitimation. The choice going forward is between what I will call "liberal populism" and "plural professionalism."
Liberal populism starts with the claim that democracy — understood as majoritarianism — should be a core principle of governance. It argues that Democrats took a wrong turn by attempting to govern primarily through insulated administrative agencies that outsource much of their work to external compliance offices and professions, which give meaning to vague laws. It would attempt to reconstruct a somewhat lost liberal tradition, which was very much alive during the original populist movement of the late 19th century: legislative supremacy based on simple, brute-force interventions like taxing, spending, and in some cases, direct public ownership.
Liberal populism would be the enemy of what I have called in these pages "kludgeocracy" — the proliferation of overlapping institutions and interventions that are difficult for citizens to comprehend or control. It would attack the filibuster in Congress, even if that led to more instability in the law or gave the other side a chance to implement its preferred agenda. While it would not ignore expert opinion, it would expect that opinion to manifest primarily in advice to legislators and enhanced legislative capacity rather than in executive activity or professional rulemaking.
Liberal populism would also be skeptical of the producer interest in government — such as that of public-sector unions — and insist that decisions about education and public safety be made through more centralized, visible, participatory legislative mechanisms. It would focus on building mass organizations that reflect the preferences of ordinary citizens who consume government services, not those of the professional, expert, academia-aligned interests that Matthew Yglesias has referred to as "the groups." Where questions of housing and infrastructure are concerned, it would strip away most of the procedural objections to projects that have been approved by majorities, even at the risk of permitting overly ambitious projects that fail to take into account concentrated minority interests.
A second alternative is what Harvard education professor Jal Mehta and I have called "plural professionalism." This theory of governance takes seriously the contention that majoritarianism is incompatible with a state composed of administrative agencies that have sweeping jurisdiction and broad discretionary authority. It acknowledges that, unless we radically reconsider the structure of our current government, we will continue to have an administrative state, which means delegations of lawmaking power to insulated agencies will be a fact of life. It further recognizes that the key problem with modern administrative governance is not expertise itself, but expert governance that promotes the normative preferences and material interests of a handful of elites. Instead, it needs to be squared with the plural character of our highly diverse society.
Pluralism begins with the simple observation that, in highly contested cultural domains, there is not a single "good" that can provide an anchor for expert, technocratic calculation; there are rather multiple goods and various legitimate ways of life. Administrative governance needs to permit people with very different conceptions of the good to live together in one polity.
We can see what this might look like most clearly in the area of education. Plural professionalism in higher education would be skeptical of regulating universities on the basis of majority opinion. Instead, it would recognize that citizens have very different ideas of what constitutes an educated person, and would encourage the development of a rich variety of public institutions that cater to those varied definitions. In Florida, for instance, plural professionalism would have looked skeptically on the takeover of New College by a governor-appointed board of Trump-aligned conservatives. But it would have been highly supportive of the creation of new universities and units within universities, like the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, that do not reflect the current dominant opinion of those in academia but rather expand the choices available to students in the state.
In K-12 education, plural professionalism would have been mostly hostile to efforts to ban critical race theory and impose a state-enforced history curriculum. Instead, it would try to square pluralism with professionalism by encouraging the development of diverse schools linked to different models of education (no excuses, classical, progressive, etc.) with their own education schools, licensing boards, and institutions for the development of curricula and educational materials. It would give up on the idea that there is "One Best System," and instead facilitate the development of expert knowledge within a range of educational traditions.
More broadly, plural professionalism would point toward the need for greater plurality within professions. If we are going to have a single public-health profession, for instance, Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago has argued that it must include students from a much wider range of ideological and cultural perspectives than it does today, both to gain the trust of diverse constituencies and to help its leaders understand more conservative populations. I have made in these pages a somewhat similar argument where the broad professoriate is concerned. It is difficult to justify to a plural public the role of experts and institutions like universities when they are seen as (and in fact, are) the narrow province of a sliver of the country's population. If we want expert governance, we need a more diverse expert class.
NO GOING BACK
Both liberal populism and plural professionalism have attractive features as ways of pointing beyond the democratic deficit of contemporary liberal practice. Those who believe in the need for activist government may end up picking and choosing between the two in the future.
Perhaps other sorts of solutions to the democratic deficit will emerge. Regardless of the path chosen, we must contend with the problem. The question of how to reconstruct the institutions of activist government will be unavoidable in the wake of the Trump administration's attacks on our legacy bureaucratic practice. We can do better than to reactively defend institutions and practices that have, if we are honest, disappointed in their ability to deliver either effective governance or justice. We need to focus instead on building a new state, one both more popularly legitimate and practically effective than the one it replaces.
