The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (281 page)

 
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The proportion of the registered electorate who vote in a given election. Turnout is both important and difficult to measure where registration is itself a costly process, especially in the United States. At the other extreme, regimes with compulsory voting (such as Australia), still have turnout well below 100 per cent, as the compulsory-voting laws are rarely enforced. There has been a general tendency in a number of countries including the United Kingdom for turnout to decline since a peak in the 1950s. Some view this with alarm, others do not, either because too high a turnout has been argued to place too great a strain of conflicting demands on the political system, or because rational economic men and women who know that their own vote is highly unlikely to influence the election do not bother to vote. Some weak confirmation of the last view is provided by the association between turnout and the expected closeness of the election; but this explanation cannot explain turnouts of over 70 per cent in elections which nobody expected to be close, such as the British General Election of 1983.

 
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Political systems in which only two political parties effectively compete for government office. Minor parties may operate in such a system, although in some cases, as in the United States, they may have to surmount significant barriers to be placed on the ballot paper. Some theorists argue that two-party systems offer a superior form of electoral democracy because unless there are only two parties, there can be no guarantee that any party will have a legislative majority, without which government policy is formed on the basis of bargaining between political élites, which is seen as less accessible to popular control. However, in a two-party system much policy formation takes place within the political parties, also away from popular control. Two-party systems are most often found in association with first-past-the-post electoral systems, as in the United States and New Zealand, although Austrian politics was dominated for much of the postwar period by the two leading political parties.
WG 

 
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In classical thought, a corrupt form of monarchy in which a person ruled in his own interest. More generally, the abuse of the state's coercive force in the absence of the rule of law. This absence more particularly suggests government by the will of the tyrant ( cf.
dictatorship
) and the arbitrary treatment of citizens, if not the systematic use of terror. Democratic theorists like J. S.
Mill
have been concerned to avoid the tyranny of the majority. They fear that the rights of minorities and the stability of expectations built on settled law could be neglected by the majority's abuse of its numerical superiority under a system apparently legitimating the carrying out of its will.
AR 

 
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A fear expressed variously by
Plato
,
Aristotle
,
Madison
,
Tocqueville
, and J. S.
Mill
. If the majority rules, what is to stop it from expropriating the minority, or from tyrannizing it in other ways by enforcing the majority's religion, language, or culture on the minority? Madison's answer in
The
Federalist
is the best known. He argued that the United States must have a federal structure. Although one majority, left to itself, would try to tyrannize the local minority in one state or city and another majority, left to itself, would do the same in another, in a country as large and diverse as the United States there would not be one national majority which could tyrannize over a national minority. But if there was, the powers which the states retained to themselves while constructing the federal constitution of 1787 would be a bulwark against it. The separation of powers among legislature, executive, and judiciary at federal level would be a further protection against majority tyranny.
Critics of Madison have pointed out that his formula gives no protection to minorities which do not form a local majority anywhere. In particular, the Madisonian constitution gave no effective protection to black Americans until the 1960s, largely because the
states
’ rights which Madison thought it so important to protect were used by the white majorities in the Southern states to oppress the local black minorities.
J. S. Mill's solutions to majority tyranny were
proportional representation
and extra votes for the rich and the well-educated. Neither solution bears close examination. Proportional representation is a solution to a different problem. If there is a majority, it is a majority, and proportional representation will not make it less so (although it may correct some overrepresentation of the majority). The majority of voters in Northern Ireland since 1921 has always been Protestant; the population votes almost entirely along religious lines; therefore any fairly elected Northern Ireland assembly must have a Protestant majority. Mill's solution of ‘fancy franchises’ is open to the same objection as Madison's.
The main danger that worried Aristotle , Madison , and Mill alike was that the majority poor citizenry would vote for confiscatory legislation at the expense of the rich minority. For whatever reason, this has never happened. At least we can be confident that the majority will not expropriate the median voter. See also
Black
.

 
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