That’s the argument advocates of direct democracy generally support, but no actual democratic systems fully implement direct democracy. In practice what we generally have is representative democracy, where we delegate the power to make laws, and make and implement policy to representatives.
Those representatives have personal moral responsibility for the laws and decisions they make and are sovereign individuals in their own right, as is any citizen. There’s an argument (I think a strong one) that having been elected they have a right to make laws or rule according to their own beliefs and conscience, within the limits of the law. They’re not just the compliant meat puppets of “the people”.
Of course there are examples of direct democracy, in the form of referendums on specific issues, and these highlight many of the problems with direct democracy. You end up with votes raising spending, alongside votes cutting taxes, with a side order of votes banning government borrowing. You get situations like Switzerland voting to align with the EU along with its free movement provisions, then a referendum mandating ending free movement (but not any other aspects of the treaty), then a referendum confirming maintaining the EU treaty. Take Brexit, what does it mean? Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, there are infinite different possible variations. Which one did the British public intend? Well, different members of the public intended different things, who gets to choose? What happens when the public vote for one thing but most elected people in government responsible for implementing it think it’s a bad idea?
The problem is “the people” don’t have a single coherent group consciousness capable of reconciling competing priorities. That’s what leaders are for.
> That’s the argument advocates of direct democracy generally support, but no actual democratic systems fully implement direct democracy.
To be fair, Switzerland comes very close. The public can pass initiatives or constitutional amendments without government intervention through public votes, and the few Swiss people I know consider this to be the primary political system in Switzerland (not the representative electoral system they have, though they also have a very interesting mechanism for their President which requires cross-party agreement for any government decision).
Saying "no system fully implements direct democracy" feels like a no-true-scotsman stance, since by the same token no system fully implements representative democracy either (AFAIK no country guarantees that there is a precise percentage match of party representation to the popular vote with no lower bound on how many votes a party needs to enter, as it would be unworkable to have such a system).
> The problem is “the people” don’t have a single coherent group consciousness capable of reconciling competing priorities. That’s what leaders are for.
The flip side is that in representative democracies (especially with broken voting systems that are not even remotely representative such as in the US, UK, and most of the world) you are very limited in your choices of leader and thus sentiments which are popular with the public can be completely ignored. There is no mechanism to force a public initiative that has legal weight, so you have to hope that a major party will be in favour of your pet issue and they can convince other bureaucrats to support something that is popular.
I would not say that I'm a proponent of direct democracy but I don't think having some public initiative system would be a bad thing. But if we are going to keep representative democracies with the argument that the leaders represent the people but have some expertise (though cynical people would argue that is not the case anyway) then you cannot have broken electoral systems because their political power is no longer morally justified. But of course, no party that gets in power would likely ever change the entire electoral system since they have a strong political incentive to not do so (and with representative democracies, election promises aren't worth the paper they're written on).
The classic representative democracy suffers from a problem that it promotes a-holes to power. Because they have no scrupules to lie and cheat they have to get and hold power. And this explain the fact that the percentage of a-holes in political elites is way bigger then in rest of populations. (btw this specific problem could be easily solved by replacing elections by some form of lottery)
What is relatively unknown about Swiss democracy is that on the referendums on national level are extremely rare, but a possibility of a referendum looms like a Damocles sword over political elites and prevent them from abusing their legislative power.
> The flip side is that in representative democracies (especially with broken voting systems that are not even remotely representative such as in the US, UK, and most of the world) you are very limited in your choices of leader and thus sentiments which are popular with the public can be completely ignored. There is no mechanism to force a public initiative that has legal weight, so you have to hope that a major party will be in favour of your pet issue and they can convince other bureaucrats to support something that is popular.
Please don't lump the extremely broken US political system with the slightly less broken British and former colonies (Canada, Australia, NZ, etc.) and even less so with the rest of democratic countries around the world which is usually using representative systems. Furthermore, some countries have explicit constitutional schemes where a petition with enough signatures needs to be voted on in parliament or even called in as a referendum.
> Please don't lump the extremely broken US political system with the slightly less broken British and former colonies (Canada, Australia, NZ, etc.) and even less so with the rest of democratic countries around the world which is usually using representative systems.
I live in Australia. Any system which uses winner-takes-all-electorates is structurally unrepresentative. The party list systems in Germany and New Zealand get closer but have other flaws (enshrining of party politics, no preferential voting) and so on. Even a hypothetical Condorcet system with only one house and no local electorates then has the flipped issue that there is no local accountability. A multi-seat preferential electoral system (which is what I'd advocate for) has a threshold issue where you have to decide at which point a particular percentage of the vote is too low to no longer deserve representation. Any system requires tradeoffs and as we all know from the Arrow Theorem (and the Alabama Paradox) there isn't even such a thing as a perfect voting system, so why would we expect to have a perfect electoral system?
My point was not that these are not acceptable systems (though some are better than others), just that if we're going to start talking about how no-true-scotsman perfect systems, it's not reasonable to ignore that the status quo also has a very similar (and in many cases wider) departure from the theoretical state it should be.
And as a non-American, I really dislike this tendency many non-American people have to say "at least it's not as bad in the States!" -- this just breeds complacency as everyone cares more about what's happening to the political system in a foreign country rather than their own. We should all be working to improve things wherever we are, instead of just pointing and laughing at the US.
Also it's not fair to lump New Zealand with Australia, nor Australia with Canada. They all have completely different electoral systems -- so much so that there's literally no reason to group them in any serious discussion.
>especially with broken voting systems that are not even remotely representative such as in the US, UK, and most of the world.
There are many flavours of representative democracy. It depend what is being represented. In the British system that’s constituencies. In proportional systems, that’s political parties. Neither are particularly more or less inherently legitimate IMHO.
Ultimately whether a democracy and its system is legitimate rests on a consensus of the consent of the people to that system. I think would clearly ludicrous to argue that the British people do not consent to their system of government.
> There are many flavours of representative democracy. It depend what is being represented. In the British system that’s constituencies. In proportional systems, that’s political parties. Neither are particularly more or less inherently legitimate IMHO.
I would consider 10% of a country voting for a party as first preference but less than 0.7% of parliament seats (by which I mean a single seat) being allocated to them (as was the case in Australia until the last election where it's still around 2% representation) to be unrepresentative by any reasonable definition of the word. Whether you feel that the voting system in your country needs to be purely representative in order to be legitimate is a philosophical question and whether you feel that an unrepresentative system is legitimate is a separate discussion.
Whether you think parties should be entrenched or not (I'm not particularly fond of the idea), it is literally not representing the public votes. This is because Australia has winner-takes-all electorates and. You can have electorate systems that don't have one-seat electorates. Winner-takes-all electorates lead to this problem.
> I think would clearly ludicrous to argue that the British people do not consent to their system of government.
I would think it to be naive to argue that every election is a referendum on the fundamental system of government in the country where no party is running on such a platform and there are many factors making it essentially untenable to even attempt to have a third party push the issue.
I suspect few British people would say their government is illegitimate but I also suspect very few would say "I have a continuing and active choice in the fundamental way political power is structured in my country, above voting for individual political parties."
That’s only unrepresentative if you privilege parties over constituencies. There’s an argument for that but it’s not a given. I detest party lists though, it’s a terrible idea to suborn elected representatives to a party bureaucracy. Elected representatives should be ultimately answerable to the electorate.
I don’t think it’s fair to phrase it that way, I’m terms of choice. Democracy doesn’t give individuals a choice in how they are governed, it grants them a vote. That’s not the same thing. Also I don’t think it’s reasonable to have the structure of political power up fir continuous change. There should be mechanisms fir change, sure, but in most cases that should be over fairly long time frames with plenty of brakes in the process.
The reason is that changing power structures is extremely dangerous. Once you fall into a peer structure that’s vulnerable to abuse by a clique or even worse an individual, you can easily get trapped in it permanently. In a constantly changing system up for frequent revision it seems like that would eventually be inevitable.
> That’s only unrepresentative if you privilege parties over constituencies. There’s an argument for that but it’s not a given.
How would multi-seat electorates privilege parties over constituencies? It would literally mean more representation of different views in on electorate.
> I would consider 10% of a country voting for a party as first preference but less than 0.7% of parliament seats (by which I mean a single seat) being allocated to them (as was the case in Australia until the last election where it's still around 2% representation) to be unrepresentative by any reasonable definition of the word.
It is a consistent outcome, the recent election is an anomaly. The explanation for why this is the case is a bit complicated but the crux is that only one candidate can win in each seat and while we have preferential voting, the preferences only matter in each race -- and if you aren't in the top two on first preferences then you won't win that seat (nor any other seat where that is the case). It would be easily possible for them to have 0% representation, it just so happens that the Greens party leader's electorate is incredibly pro-Green and so he gets ~47% of the first preference vote, which is unusually high and makes him win the seat easily.
Our upper house is far more representative because each state and territory has multiple seats and thus you can get a more representative outcome.
> Saying "no system fully implements direct democracy" feels like a no-true-scotsman stance, since by the same token no system fully implements representative democracy either
Of course some systems implement forms of direct democracies, although they are not represented in the UN because they are not taking part in the "game of thrones" of international politics. But saying that no Nation State implements direct democracy is right on point, because "democracy" is the very opposite (by definition, i.e. "power to the people") to the State ("power over the people").
In contrast, most States on Earth (even Kingdoms!) implement forms of representation/election. Now, can we even call that a democracy? Electoral systems as we know them today were designed in the 18th century by french and american politicians/philosophers who were strongly opposed to (and afraid of) democracy so that's a bit of a stretch.
I mean take a very simple issue: ask everyone "should some people be sleeping on the streets when there's millions of empty dwellings?" and they'll all say "no". Now see what the government is doing with this popular will, and you'll understand government don't care about the people and wipe their asses with our needs. Call me "cynical" if you will but i'm certain the people who uphold Nation State have no expertise, and certainly have material interests opposed to ours.
Ah okay, you're having a philosophical argument about the concept of a direct democracy and how it technically should be a form of anarchy or possibly anarcho-syndicalism.
While I think that is also a very interesting topic and I'm sure we would agree on many things, I'm not sure it helps to get into the philosophical argument while talking about real-life political systems and the different flavours of representative democracies.
I don't think i am, sorry if it sounds like bikeshedding. I'm interested in the practical question of who holds political power, and who holds the "legitimate violence" to enforce this political power.
If me and my neighbors can't "legally" define our own sets of rules and regulations (which we can't in France), i just can't call that a democracy. Time and time again i've witnessed local communes get crushed by national/industrial interests... that's a very practical concern, not philosophical, whether you can keep your home and your life or they're going to destroy your entire village like they did around the Hambach charcoal mine (or like they tried in NDDL, or are still trying in Bure).
I do believe mechanisms for secession can make sense. I hope Scotland stays in the Union but I also believe they should have the right to choose not to. However then you get into the question of what constitutes a region that could reasonably secede. That must imply a historic and inalienable right to the territory, to be able to make that decision. It’s a difficult one.
If you and your neighbours want to not be subject to the French government, you can always go somewhere else. The fact there’s probably nowhere better for you to go is hardly France’s problem.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to say it's not an important discussion, just simply that if we start by saying that no country which is not anarchist cannot be called a democracy feels like a semantic gotcha if we're talking about electoral systems in countries that are commonly called democratic.
> (AFAIK no country guarantees that there is a precise percentage match of party representation to the popular vote with no lower bound on how many votes a party needs to enter, as it would be unworkable to have such a system
Representative democracy doesn’t require a “precise percentage match of party representation …”, but direct democracy is explicitly defined as a system in which there are no representatives.
> especially with broken voting systems that are not even remotely representative such as in the US, UK, and most of the world
This is hyperbole. The US system is pretty representative, and the extent to which it isn’t has very little to do with the voting system and much more to do with incentives (elected officials are beholden to their corporate backers rather than their constituents) and to a lesser extent, our two party system.
We very much don’t. Public proposals have to go through multiple rounds of deliberation, cooling down, revision and supermajority popular approval before becoming law.
I am repeating what I have heard from other Swiss people, so while you may not feel that the electoral system is as good as it should be (which is a completely justified opinion in any country and I am sure that Swiss people are not a monolith on this topic), it would be disingenuous to say that Switzerland is not even remotely close to a direct democracy. I am not aware of any other country that has a formal mechanism for laws to be changed where the government or parliament is not directly controlling the process.
> it would be disingenuous to say that Switzerland is not even remotely close to a direct democracy
I am saying it is as good as it is because it is not direct. The majority can propose an initiative, but the legislature gets to deliberate and draft a counter-proposal, with all of this taking time and encouraging sponsors to withdraw their initiative. In essence, it’s a way to prompt the legislature in a certain direction. Not for the majority to write the law. For an example of how that breaks, see California’s referendum process.
And also, from my understanding a local Commune doesn't have the power to overrule national laws locally. Which means that when a short majority of racists sets up bans related to muslim cults as happened a few years ago, a local municipality can't overrule that and say all faiths and buildings and clothings are welcome.
Those representatives have personal moral responsibility for the laws and decisions they make and are sovereign individuals in their own right, as is any citizen. There’s an argument (I think a strong one) that having been elected they have a right to make laws or rule according to their own beliefs and conscience, within the limits of the law. They’re not just the compliant meat puppets of “the people”.
Of course there are examples of direct democracy, in the form of referendums on specific issues, and these highlight many of the problems with direct democracy. You end up with votes raising spending, alongside votes cutting taxes, with a side order of votes banning government borrowing. You get situations like Switzerland voting to align with the EU along with its free movement provisions, then a referendum mandating ending free movement (but not any other aspects of the treaty), then a referendum confirming maintaining the EU treaty. Take Brexit, what does it mean? Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, there are infinite different possible variations. Which one did the British public intend? Well, different members of the public intended different things, who gets to choose? What happens when the public vote for one thing but most elected people in government responsible for implementing it think it’s a bad idea?
The problem is “the people” don’t have a single coherent group consciousness capable of reconciling competing priorities. That’s what leaders are for.