Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

Direct and indirect democracy

I will get back to my series of posts on “First principles” fairly soon, but in the meantime this came up and I just had to say something. Jeff Jacoby writes…

Those who fulminate against letting voters periodically vote on ballot measures believe that citizens are too dumb to judge the merits of legislation - and that such decisions are therefore best left to the lawmakers they apparently weren’t too dumb to elect. It’s a curious logic, but just think what Mel Brooks could do with it.

Which leaves me to wonder… perhaps the opposite conclusion is true? The citizens are smart enough to judge the merits of legislation but not smart enough to choose who will represent them as lawmakers?

As for me, I think that if a state constitution allows its citizens to use the initiative process to amend its laws or even its constitution that that’s fine. I’m particularly in favor of the idea of a clause in a constitution that provides for citizen recall of elected officials, maybe even appointees as well. But, I am not otherwise in favor of direct democracy. I am especially not in favor of direct democracy at the federal level.

Why do you think that the founders originally set up a bicameral legislature? Why do you think it is that one of the houses is composed of representatives in proportion to the population of the states while the other gives each state equal representation?

Could it possibly be that they wanted to avoid for as long as possible the tyranny of the majority? Might it not be that they wanted to balance the interests of highly concentrated regions of the nation against those of the more sparsely populated regions?

Direct democracy simply doesn’t provide that kind of balance of interests.

By all means, let the initiative campaign thrive where the people have that power. As Mr. Jacoby notes, more often than not the people are smart enough to vote down a bad initiative. Politicians do tend to resent the power that the people hold over their carefully crafted back room deals in those states where the initiative process lives.

But…

In general, people don’t have the time to pay attention to every issue of governance. Nor does a simple majority of the people tend to promote the interests and values of the minority – especially in urban vs. rural issues. We do elect representatives for just those reason. Direct democracy is not a good enough substitute for representative democracy. That is, unless the representatives stop paying attention to their constituents, and the constituents let it pass.

A tip of the hat to Paul Jacob.