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Majoritarianism is the doctrine or philosophy that majority rule should prevail in democratic decision-making. Most majoritarians do not advocate absolute and unlimited majority rule, and they allow that restraints on majorities and minority rights have a legitimate place under democratic government. The other contemporary democracies are in most respects more non-majoritarian — that is, consensus democracy — than majoritarian. The chapter examines the twenty-eight stable democracies with populations larger than two million in the late 1990s, stability being defined in terms of continuous democratic rule for at least twenty years. Majoritarianism may be regarded as a Kuhnian paradigm, a basic concept that is widely accepted in spite of major discrepancies between facts and theory. These deviations from the majoritarian paradigm are either ignored altogether, or are explained away as slight exceptions to the majoritarian interpretation of democracy, which is not seriously questioned.