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> "tyranny of masses"

That's democracy. If you water down or prevent the democratic will through ANY means to empower the will of the minority over the majority for ANY reason, then you end up implementing the governance of an elite.

Minority rights of the people are a different matter - they would be guaranteed by the civil law governing human rights in a country - they dont have anything to do with the democratic will.

No.

We live in representative democracies not absolute democracies and these table thumping maximalist positions rarely make good conversation or policy.

They get retweeted though.

> representative democracies / absolute democracies

The dichotomy above is impossible to interpret. What does that even mean. So when a democracy is representative, the minority's will can override the majority's will? Then what does the representation part in the representative democracy mean.

> So when a democracy is representative, the minority's will can override the majority's will?

Yes, and this is a feature, not a bug. Majority voting on issues one at a time cannot generate a deal that a majority would prefer when the compromise is presented as a block. Eg, if there are six different compatible single-issues that 10% of the people care solely about each, each individual one would get voted down 90-10, while representatives can make a bargain that delivers a combined platform approved of by 60%.

What does compatible mean if they would get voted down 90-10?

Something like a policy proposal costing a low but non-zero amount of money for exactly zero benefit outside of the eyes of the 10% who really care about their pet cause. The non-packaged proposals get voted down not because the majority hates them, but because they don't care, at least not like the special interest does.

If a vector space is more your jam, imagine a six-dimensional vector space of policies, and each of these six hypothetical interest groups as voting for any combination of policies with a positive value along the axis in question, and against any combination of policies with a negative value. [100, -1, -1, -1, -1, -1], [-1, 100, -1, -1, -1, -1], etc, will each get voted down when presented individually as policies, but their sum as a package gets supported by each interest group.

I see, thanks for example.

That's not relevant. You are talking about coalition governments, in which the ensuing coalition government still represents the will of the majority. Each ~20% segment of the population represented by the 20% participant in the coalition government pushing forth ~20% supported issues and passing them does not mean that those are the will if the minority. It means that only 20% want to pass it now, but the rest do NOT object to its passing. That's still a majority government.

For a democratic majority-minority situation to occur, you must have 20% of the population wanting to pass something, but at least 20% of the population opposing it.

In this hypothetical, the rest do object to the pet issues of others in the coalition, but only weakly. Like, I personally would vote against corn subsidies by itself, for abortion rights, and for a package of (corn subsidies plus abortion rights). The exact policies I mentioned don't particularly matter, I'm sure you can find your own set of two issues that you'd vote this way on if it came down to it - the issues you have an opinion on, but you'd hold your nose and concede the issue if it was the price of something really important to you.

And when two or more minority interest groups feel this way on each other's issues, it is a failure to enact the "will of the people" if you use strict issue-by-issue majoritarianism. After all, each individual pet issue fails on its own merits - they just aren't broadly popular enough.

Fundamentally, the issue is that strengths of preferences do not show up in a referendum on a topic. Furthermore, there's no way to credibly commit to a compromise that gets you something important in exchange for a relatively unimportant concession. I'm not saying these issues outweigh the benefits of direct democracy, they're just problems that can get solved by a representative system.

> In this hypothetical, the rest do object to the pet issues of others in the coalition, but only weakly

That means that the majority wants those issues. If 20% of the population wants something, 10% opposes it, and 70% doesnt care if it passes, it means that a majority wants that policy to pass. The majority does not need to be for something explicitly for it to be a majority decision. There has to be more people in a society wanting something than those who dont, and the rest not objecting to that policy. Its still a majority decision.

> If 20% of the population wants something, 10% opposes it, and 70% doesnt care if it passes

That isn't the hypothetical I'm using to make my point. Obviously if you change the hypothetical you come up with different results, but then it isn't the scenario I'm using as an intuition pump.

Like, what I'm getting at is that there are sometimes policies you want your government to pass, even though more people oppose it than support it and nobody being truly undecided. Not all policy choices are equally important, and not everyone considers all policy choices equally important. A referendum is structurally incapable of enacting policies with minority support, for good or for bad. It's usually for good, true, but there are circumstances where you can do better by making sure that people think that the important policies are implemented, even at the cost of the majority not getting their way on relatively unimportant matters.

> even though more people oppose it than support it

In no case in which sufficient amount of people oppose something, a policy can pass. Of course, Im talking about proportional representation systems. In first past the post, what you speak of is possible if that issue is not so critical to that amount of people that they may not vote on it as their #1 issue. Then the opposing party can win with a low margin on some other issue in which they have majority, meanwhile passing that other policy as well. This is an ill of the FPTP system. In proportional representation, that does not happen.

Of course, FPTP itself is something that was implemented to avoid the democracy of the majority, so that's no surprise.

> A referendum is structurally incapable of enacting policies with minority support, for good or for bad.

With a single-subject rule, that’s often (but not always) true; without it, it is less true, because policies can be packaged to achieve a combined majority, so long as there isn’t a majority that thinks it is important enough to defeat any part to overcome any support within that majority for other parts. (Even with a single-subject rule, this can sometimes be done, so long as the policies packaged relate to sufficiently closely related subject matter as to fit within the way the rule is applied.)

This is common in legislative bodies, and it works with citizen-legislators, too.

Even without a single-subject rule, there's zero enforcement mechanism to prevent other interest groups from reneging on the packaging agreement and defeating one or more parts in detail. There's no stable point you can get via referenda if (policy A + policy B), (policy not-A), and (policy not-B) all would garner majority votes.

> Even without a single-subject rule, there’s zero enforcement mechanism to prevent other interest groups from reneging on the packaging agreement and defeating one or more parts in detail.

Sure, after the package passes, groups can try to form separate coalitions to pick things out of it; there are methods to protect them, generally (such as putting together a similar coalition to put up a trigger bill that deletes the parts the other groups want to protect conditioned on the other repeal passing, undermining its support.)

> There’s no stable point

Yeah, real world politics is generally not about finding stable equilibria, as much are the things most easily amenable to theoretical analysis.

Pure majoritarianism isn't necessarily best either, it just always takes the majority's side in disputes where a strongly-held minority opinion comes in conflict with a weakly-held majority one. Like, it's obvious that you should take the side of the majority when it's "we'd rather not be slightly inconvenienced by paying for rent-seekers" regardless of how intensely the minority of rent-seekers want to rent-seek, but it's much less obvious that we should have zero handouts to narrow interests when it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment, I don't care how little the general public is aware of and cares about it and would generally prefer lower taxes"

> but it's much less obvious that we should have zero handouts to narrow interests when it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment, I don't care how little the general public is aware of and cares about it and would generally prefer lower taxes"

In reality, this turns into we should have billion dollar handouts to narrow interests because rather than use taxpayer funds to R&D cures into the public domain using the existing world class university system, the narrow interests would prefer being able to benefit from patented medicines:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/drug-prices-reach-new-highin-th...

> Since August, U.S. or European health regulators have approved four new products intended as one-time treatments for rare genetic diseases that carry list prices of at least $2 million a patient, including two from Bluebird Bio Inc.

Okay, make the hypothetical be malaria nets or insulin then. The exact specifics don't matter all that much, it's just an illustration that you can't use issue-by-issue majoritarianism to generate a coalition that can pass a broadly popular group of policies that lacks individual plank-by-plank popularity. There's no enforcement mechanism to coordinate a "you vote for my pet issue and I'll vote for yours".

> it's "please spend $10000 per life saved via rare-disease research and treatment

That's an extreme extrapolation. Sure, the majority would maybe not care at all for such a minority treatment if it came to pass. But then again, the practical reality is that in a system that allows minority to override the majority, everything else goes wrong even if that one goes right.

There is an example. The US was explicitly crafted as a format that would allow the minority to override the majority to prevent 'the tyranny of the majority'. This was explicitly expressed by various founding fathers of the US, especially by de facto architect of its constutition, John Adams. And that's the reason why there is FPTP, the Senate, the supreme court, with the latter two easily able to override whatever majority vote is.

They did this because they feared the majority demanding land redistribution and passing it with their vote. The British aristocrats' lands were confiscated and redistributed after the revolution, that was ok. But the founding fathers feared that it would give ideas to the people about the lands of the now-American-but-ex-British elite like themselves.

The Legislative is not a single person, who weights the options, who accepts the governors revision on behalf of the senate and assembly?

The language on their website implies that they act collectively in the event of a veto “A vetoed bill can become law if two-thirds of the members of each house vote to override the Governor's veto.”[0].

Practically speaking, there are usually committees (may be area specific, or general such as scheduling/introductory) that make the first choice as to how the process will continue. For new york this seems to be the standing committee which decides what will be put to a vote, “ Members of Standing Committees evaluate bills and decide whether to "report" them (send them) to the Senate floor for a final decision by the full membership.”[0].

[0]-https://www.nysenate.gov/how-bill-becomes-law

Thank you for the explanation, but that does not quite hit the spot: it explains what would happen if the governor vetoes the bill. In this case the governor claims she made some "agreement" with the Legislative to change the text of the bill shortly before signing it. And it appears that happened without Senate and Assembly voting on these changes, completely skipping this "final decision by the full membership".

I would like to know who the governor made an agreement with. The Standing Committees might be a possibility. kwiens named the bills sponsors as a possibility. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34193369). If the bill was changed shortly before signing it, i would also like to know what the text of the signed bill is. This whole process implied by memorandum #93 seems irregular to me.

Stuff like this should be documented publicly, IMHO.

> 3.) Accept the governor's revisions and move the bill forward

Nice write up, but leaves me wondering how this works formally.

My main guesses:

1.) There will be a vote to formally accept the new changes, but it’s treated as a done deal.

2.) The governor can formally edit the text to say anything she wants, and it’s up to the legislature to protest afterwards.