The Logic of Minority Rights

Abstract

In this paper, we address three questions regarding minority party rights in legislatures. First, why does a majority allow for minority rights? Second, what motivates the use of the rights by legislative minorities? And third, given the majority’s self-interested motivation for the provision of minority rights, why do minority parties continue to use them? Prior research has attempted to answer these questions individually by focusing on either the role minority rights play in fulfilling legislatures’ normative system function or the isolated strategic calculations of legislative majorities and minorities. By considering actor’s strategies in isolation, these theories do not fully incorporate the interactions between majorities and minorities. Our approach unifies the multiple facets of minority rights through the use of a formal model. In our model, a majority party proposes a policy and a minority party decides to use their rights to bring the majority's proposal to the public's attention. Both parties are concerned with appeasing core supporters while simultaneously trying to improve their electoral prospects by catering to an undecided voter. Our model shows that given a level of uncertainty about the public's preferred policy, the minority will prefer to use rights to prevent the passage of extreme legislation. Additionally, the majority prefers to let the minority use its rights, which at times results in free publicity for a popular policy. Our conclusions suggest that legislative minorities can influence policy and that majorities need not be solely concerned with political insurance to provide for minority rights.