Partisanship, Sophistication, and Public Attitudes about Majority Rule and Minority Rights in Congress
| Author | Steven S. Smith,Hong Min Park |
| Date | 01 November 2016 |
| Published date | 01 November 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12140 |
HONG MIN PARK
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
STEVEN S. SMITH
Washington University in St. Louis
Partisanship, Sophistication,
and Public Attitudes about
Majority Rule and Minority Rights
in Congress
The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central issue in the
design and operation of democratic institutions and remains a contested issue in debates
of policy-making processes. Remarkably, public attitudes about this balance are not sub-
jected to scholarly investigation. In this article, we report the findings of the first survey
experiment in which the American public’s attitudes about majority rule and minority
rights in legislative bodies are explored. We find robust support for both majority rule
and minority rights, discover that only a few Americans distinguish between the US
House of Representatives and Senate in the application of these principles, and demon-
strate that views of majority rule and minority rights can be moved once we introduce
respondents to the partisan implications of procedural rules. Moreover, with conflicting
theoretical expectations about the effect of political sophistication on attitudes about
majority rule and minority rights, we find that higher levels of political sophistication
are associated with stronger partisan effects on attitudes about the balance between
majority rule and minority rights in Congress.
The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central
issue in the design and operation of democratic institutions and remains
a contested issue in debates of policy-making processes (Binder 1996,
1997; Binder and Smith 1997; Cox 2000; Koger 2010; Schickler 2000,
2001; Sinclair 1995; Wawro and Schickler 2006). It is a complicated
design issue that includesmany mechanisms, including the arrangement
of decision-making institutions, the nature of agenda-setting proce-
dures, the allocation of voting and participation rights, and the setting of
majority or supermajority voting thresholds for adopting policies or
changing rules. The number of ways that simple majority rule can be
qualified or checked is large, which may contribute to the difficulty of
LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 41, 4, November 2016 841
DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12140
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C2016 Washington University in St. Louis
gauging public views about how majority rule and minority rights
should be balanced.
The issue remains alive. In mid-2015, conservatives, including
Republican presidential candidates and prominent commentators, advo-
cated reform of the Senate filibuster to remove an obstacle to repealing
the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Senate Republican leader, Mitch
McConnell (R-KY), and other Senate Republicans insisted that their
long-term position in favor of retaining the filibuster is in the long-term
interest of the conservative cause (Bolton 2015; Chait 2015), but
pressure continued to build after the Supreme Court upheld the ACA’s
insurance subsidies in June of that year and conservatives continued to
explore ways to use reconciliation procedures to circumvent the Senate’s
cloture rule.
Remarkably, public attitudes about the balance between majority
rule and minority rights have not been subject to scholarly investigation.
Only one study (Smith and Park 2013) examines these attitudes, but its
focus is limited to a field test of change in attitudes toward the Senate fili-
buster. In this article, we report the results of the first survey experiment
in which the American public’s attitudes about majority rule and minority
rights in legislative bodies are explored. We are not surprised to find
robust support for both majority rule and minority rights, but we also
discover that only a few Americans distinguish between the US House
of Representatives and Senate in the application of these principles.
Moreover, we find that views of majority rule and minority rights can
be moved once we introduce respondents to the partisan implications
of procedural rules. Furthermore, with conflicting theoretical expecta-
tions about the effect of political sophistication on attitudes about
majority rule and minority rights, we find that higher levels of political
sophistication are associated with stronger partisan effects on attitudes
about the balance between majority rule and minority rights in Congress.
The Remarkably Limited Scholarship on Public
Attitudes about Majority Rule and Minority Rights
Social science has long been concerned about citizens’ willingness
to support basic democratic institutions and processes, but it has not
addressed public attitudes about the trade-offs between majority rule and
minority rights. In the research on Americans’ democratic values, which
dates at least to Stouffer’s 1955 study of political tolerance during
the McCarthy era and has generated a large literature in recent decades
(Gibson 2007; Stouffer 1955), scholars have given support for majority
rule little attention, perhaps because they assumed wide support for
842 Hong Min Park and Steven S. Smith
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