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Concept
Tyranny of the majority
Summary
The tyranny of the majority (or tyranny of the masses) is an inherent weakness to majority rule in which the majority of an electorate pursues exclusively its own objectives at the expense of those of the minority factions. This results in oppression of minority groups comparable to that of a tyrant or despot, argued John Stuart Mill in his 1859 book On Liberty.
The scenarios in which tyranny perception occurs are very specific, involving a sort of distortion of democracy preconditions:
Centralization excess: when the centralized power of a federation make a decision that should be local, breaking with the commitment to the subsidiarity principle. Typical solutions, in this condition, are concurrent majority and supermajority rules.
Abandonment of rationality: when, as Tocqueville remembered, a decision "which bases its claim to rule upon numbers, not upon rightness or excellence". The use of public consultation, technical consulting bodies, and other similar mechanisms help to improve rationality of decisions before voting on them. Judicial review (e.g. declaration of nullity of the decision) is the typical way after the vote.
In both cases, in a context of a nation, constitutional limits on the powers of a legislative body, and the introduction of a Bill of Rights have been used to counter the problem. A separation of powers (for example a legislative and executive majority actions subject to review by the judiciary) may also be implemented to prevent the problem from happening internally in a government.
One of the earliest occurrences of this concept can be found in Plato's dialogue Gorgias, where Callicles argues that "the makers of laws are the majority who are weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the stronger sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them" (Gorgias 483).
The origin of the term is commonly attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, who used it in his book Democracy in America.
Official source
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Supermajority
A supermajority, (supra-majority, supramajority, qualified majority, or special majority) is a requirement for a proposal to gain a specified level of support which is greater than the threshold of more than one-half used for a simple majority. Supermajority rules in a democracy can help to prevent a majority from eroding fundamental rights of a minority, but they can also hamper efforts to respond to problems and encourage corrupt compromises at times when action is taken.
Majority rule
Majority rule is the principle that the group that has the most supporters gets its way. A majority is more than half of the voters involved, and rule by such a majority is thought to be to the benefit of more than rule by less than half (a mere minority) would be. Majority rule is the binary decision rule most often used in decision-making bodies, including many legislatures of democratic nations. Where no one party wins a majority of the seats in a legislature, the majority of legislators that wields power is partly composed of members of other parties in support.
Minoritarianism
In political science, minoritarianism (or minorityism), is a neologism for a political structure or process in which a minority group of a population has a certain degree of primacy in that population's decision making, with legislative power or judicial power being held or controlled by a minority group rather than a majority that is representative of the population. Minoritarianism is most often applied disparagingly to processes in which a minority is able to block legislative changes in the presence of supermajority threshold requirements.