Political participation and the limits to redistribution

The possibility that a majority may ‘tyrannise’ a minority has long been regarded as a potential deficiency of a simple majority voting rule. Even with constitutional rules requiring 50% + 1 of the votes to win, minorities may be at the mercy of the majority. In this paper we explore a limit to such ‘exploitation’. This relies simply on the observation that, as the minority becomes smaller and the majority becomes larger, each member of the minority has more at stake, relative to each member of the majority. With costs attaching to political participation, members of the minority may collectively resist the interests of the majority.