The Trade-Off Between Majority Decision Making and Minority Rights: an Empirical Study Among Dutch Adolescents

One of the core dilemmas of liberal democracy is the tension between the will of the majority and minority rights. Recently, concerns are raised about how young people, and especially the higher educated ones, view this trade-off (e.g. Nieuwelink et al., 2018). Although most young people have a very nuanced and multidimensional view of democratic decision making in which minority interests are taken into account, they develop a more unidimensional and less nuanced view when they grow older. Especially higher educated youngsters increasingly prefer ‘pure’ majority decision making in which 50% + 1 votes is sufficient and minority interests are less important. Nieuwelink et al., suggest that young people’s earlier multidimensional views of decision making get ‘colonized’ by their impression of how decision making in the political arena works. In this study, we examine how young people view the trade-off between majority decision making and minority rights in a quantitative way. Particular attention is being paid to the role of educational level, political knowledge and an open discussion climate. Moreover, this study has a dynamic approach in which the trade-off between majority decision making and minority rights is studied under different circumstances. We employ an experimental design in which respondents (1) receive different ratios between the majority and minority and (2) are presented with various situations, for example when there has to be decided upon a law and the minority has more knowledge about the topic than the majority. In addition, attention goes out to the relation between how young people view this trade-off and other political attitudes, such as support for direct or representative ways of governance, equal rights and voting intention. We use high-quality data from the Dutch Panel on Democratic Values (DPDV), which contain information about the political attitudes among 2500 Dutch students in seventh grade.