Should the will of the majority always win through?

How do we calculate the majority? If, for argument's sake, only 50.1% of the population turn out to vote in a referendum and the majority only win by 0.6% then, in fact, we do not really know if the majority of the population is in favour. We only know that slightly over half of the population is very slightly in favour of the proposal.

Should action be taken on that basis or not? Is that the start of a bandwagon which more and more people would join, or could it be the cause of unrest and dissention? Should the will of such a tiny majority be forced on the people?

When parties govern, they often only get the votes of 40% of those that turned out to vote[someone can correct me, if I have this a bit wrong]
Turnout is often around 60%
So, the party in power has normally only been voted for by about 26% of the population [note, not convinced that I have got that quite right, seems awfully low, even to me].

Proportional representation normaly ends up with more mess imo.

And the USA situation, where a lot of the time, no 1 party seems able to move without the other, is also troublesome[though not it seems to the american electorate who like the checks and balances this brings to Washington].

It seems to me that a lot of countries have huse numbers who choose not to vote, because they cannot see the differences enough between 1 party and the other.

Of course, with an election, if a minority changes its mind during the four or five years before the next election, then there could be a swing to a different party.

If, however, a minority changes its mind after a referendum, it is too late to do anything about it.

and then there those so called 'primitive' communities where the elders just go o talking until a consensus is reached... civilised I call that!

I would like to see that in action.
Does anything much get done or changed?

I think it would depend on the status quo in the first place as to whether I would like that or not.
If everything was already rosy, then slow change would be great.
But the alternative may well be awful.

The problem with that question, is, what is meant by "majority opinion" How was it formed. How much influence on opinion was there and by who? Look at Germany during the 30's. How many Germans today would say that the majority opinion with regard to the apparent "Jewish problem" was correct and therefore determine the subsequent actions.

but in primitive communities do 'the elders' represent their group.

In Afghanistan they hold 'Loyal Jurgas' or Shuras, which are meetings of tribal and community elders who talk until they reach agreement. They never strike me as being very civilised. They are bastions of mysogny, prejudice and trading of personal advantage, generally to the disadvantage of the community as a whole and certainly to women.

who was it talked about "false consciousness"? someone called Karl Marx I think!

rosequartz, this is exactly what happens here in Switzerland. Votes/referendi are often VERY close, with only about 40% of the population voting- but it goes through on that. And of course, in a country where there are 2 (actually 4) very distinct cultural/linguistic groups, with one being quite a bit larger than the other- it can also create quite a bit of resentment over time. The French speaking Cantons here are a minortiy, but a large and substantial one- always pipped at the post.

How else would we decide on a way forward in a supposedly democratic society?

I've always been taken by the pithy little aphorism "Science is not a democracy". Sound outrageous? Well, the way we discover facts about how the world works is by debating the arguments and examining the evidence, not by conducting opinion polls. Not so long ago an opinion poll would have told you that the earth is flat and the sun orbits around it.

Science is by a long way the most successful enterprise that humanity has ever embarked upon, compared with politics, which has been going round in circles with the same issues for centuries. I'm in favour of science and evidence informing policy more, but if Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan is right the prospect of having people correctly evaluating research data doesn't seem good.

Radio 4 More or Less covered the issue last year. In essence what they found is that when asked to judge a politically uncontentious issue highly numerate people were more likely to get the correct answer than people with lower numeracy just as you would expect. However when the same data were presented in the context of a politically contentious issue such as gun crime, people would decide based on their political allegiances regardless of numeracy. In other words the prospect of even highly educated people setting aside their political prejudices and correctly evaluating scientific evidence is not supported by the research.

However, most of the important issues now transcend national boundaries, and at a global level all we have is anarchy anyway.

Democracy, of course, was invented to work in a city state – quite a small number of voters which excluded both women and slaves. Not so good in a large modern country without being adapted to work in a large modern country with no slaves and including women.

Not so good if we don't adapt it for different curcumstances, but we have adapted it and still are adapting it. The trouble with people is that they expect things to run smoothly, even complicated things, when really that's rather an unreasonable expectation.

Had a card from www.fullfact.org

According to recent surveys 51%of the public are in the majority.
So of course the will of the majority should always win through.
How else do we run the country?

How else indeed? The alternative is a dictatorship of some kind over which ordinary people have no control other than bloody revolution if history is anything to go by. A democracy, however flawed, does give Ms Jo Bloggs some kind of comeback when she doesn't like how she is being governed.

I've just noticed that I forgot the links:

More or Less was World Service, not Radio 4.

And Dan Kahan.

I'm not very comfortable with the idea of dictatorship either, but that's not what Kahan is advocating. His argument is that neither better science education, nor reducing the role of the population in determining public policy will solve the problem of how to promote science based policy. The issue is that people make certain choices because they are badges of membership to a particular culture that they identify with. Kahan's parting words are:

"Just as individual well-being depends on the quality of the natural environment, so the collective welfare of democracy depends on the quality of a science communication environment hospitable to the exercise of the ordinarily reliable reasoning faculties that ordinary citizens use to discern what is collectively known. Identifying strategies for protecting the science communication environment from antagonistic cultural meanings—and for decontaminating it when such protective measures fail—is the most critical contribution that decision science can make to the practice of democratic government."

Part of the problem with the will of the majority is how it is measured. There have been discussions here over the years about various forms of voting from proportional representation to first past the post without, understandably, consensus. (I often wonder where the post actually is, but, like Easter, it seems to be a moveable feast.) Democracy should involve far more than merely putting a cross on a bit of paper every four or five years. It includes the legislature and a free press and also extends to things about which I don't think we have ever been consulted, such as street cameras, the [mis]use of GPS in phones and other activities that have become routine under the umbrella of protection against terrorism.