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. For example, if a two-thirds majority vote in favor is required to enact a new law, an opposing minority of greater than one-third is said to have "minoritarian" powers. Even in the case where minority control is nominally limited to blocking the majority with veto power (whether as a result of a supermajority requirement or consensus decision-making), this may result in the situation where the minority retains effective control over the group's agenda and the nature of the proposals submitted to the group, as the majority would be disinclined to propose ideas that they know the minority would veto. Critics of this use of minoritarianism argue that the ability to block legislation is substantially different from the ability to enact new legislation against the will of the majority, making the analogy to unpopular "dominant minority rule" examples inappropriate. Minoritarianism is sometimes used to describe rule by a dominant minority such as an ethnic group delineated by religion, language, or some other identifying factor. For example, the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1636–1912) both ruled over the majority Han Chinese population of China. In Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and South Africa, white minorities controlled the government from 1910 through 1994. Minoritarianism may also be used to describe some cases where appeasement of minorities by votebank politics is practiced. Examples include but are not limited to, Indian Muslims and Francophone Canadians.