Majority democracy is not necessarily successful in providing for the democratic needs of minority populations.
As Halperin and Scheffer explains:
The democratization process can often resolve self-determination claims by giving rise to a political system capable of protecting and accommodating groups that would otherwise be seeking changes in political arrangements or borders. But in other cases electoral democracy may not be enough. Democracy may mean little to a minority group that is constantly outvoted. It may mean little to an indigenous people whose political culture and traditions are different from those of other groups within the state. And it may mean little to a group that feels a historical claim entitles it to greater protection or more political power. Morton H. Halperin & David J. Scheffer, Self-Determination in the New World Order, 60-61 (1992).
For centuries, the dominant American ethnic group, the "Anglo-Americans," has interpreted democracy as simply establishing majority rule within the framework of electoral politics. This has developed naturally from the notion that all United States citizens have become assimilated into a single, new ethnic identity: Americans. Americans have taken pride in their concepts of achieving unity in diversity, of being composed of races from all parts of Europe who nonetheless were single mindedly dedicated to the "melting pot," of creating one nation single nation-state of assimilation, in short. (Yussuf N. Kly, 1989). The paradox is that those who held this view, for whatever reason, saw no contradiction in segregating both the African and the Native American outside of this "melting pot."
As evidenced by the existing map of racial or ethnic relations in the United States today, at least four separate pots emerged each containing a number of diverse yet roughly similar populations, each pot interacting with the other while at the same time melting separately out......
