Podcast: Majoritarianism without Majorities – In Conversation with Kanchan Chandra

In this conversation for CEU Democracy Institute’s journal Review of Democracy hosted by our Global Forum editor Anubha Anushree and RevDem Co-Managing Editor Ferenc Laczo, Professor Kanchan Chandra offers an incisive exploration of the strengths and limitations of modern democracies, focusing on the United States, the United Kingdom, and India—three of the world’s most prominent democratic systems. Chandra revisits one of the central dilemmas facing democracies in the 21st century: how to respond to the challenge of majoritarian nationalisms. She makes the compelling case that this challenge can be tackled through two bold and innovative approaches: by focusing on what she terms “minorities within majorities” and by strengthening protections for immigrants in order to strengthen protections for citizens.

Chandra argues that democracies are built on fluid and evolving majorities, which are often constructed through mechanisms like censuses. These majorities, she contends, should be understood not as monolithic blocs but as coalitions of various minority groups. By reframing majority rule in this way, Chandra’s work suggests a paradigm shift that holds profound implications for addressing the rise of majoritarianism in all three democracies she examines. Her insights pave the way for reimagining democratic governance in a more inclusive and equitable direction, one that recognizes and protects the diversity within societies’ majorities themselves.

The conversation is based on Kanchan Chandra’s article, The Future of Multiracial Democracy: Majoritarianism Without Majorities, published in the October 2024 (35/4) issue of the Journal of Democracy.

This podcast is the first episode of RevDem’s monthly special in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy. In the framework of this new partnership, authors shall discuss outstanding articles from the newest print issue of the Journal of Democracy each month.

Kanchan Chandra (Ph.D. 2000, Harvard), Professor of Politics at NYU, works on questions of ethnicity, democracy, violence, patronage and clientelism, party politics and the politics of South Asia. She is the author of Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage Politics and Ethnic Head Count in India (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and lead author of Democratic Dynasties (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Constructivist Theories of Ethnic Politics (Oxford University Press, 2012) and of several articles in leading academic journals. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Princeton Program on Democracy and Development, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences, the Russell Sage Foundation and research grants from the National Science Foundation, and the United States Institute of Peace.