Direct democracy: A comparative study of the theory and practice of government by the people

Introduction:

bespoke democracy

Once we were content with package deals. Now we want choices. People used to buy music albums and even box-sets. Nowadays, they download selected tracks for their MP3 players. Once, we were happy to watch pretty much whatever was on TV. Now, we want individual choices: we can choose different camera angles when we watch, say, Wimbledon or cricket on the telly. As consumers – as these examples show – we want individualised choices. Welcome to the world of the individual.

It is in this context of the ubiquitous individualised shopping lists, that we should see the demand for direct democracy.

Political parties, and the system of representative government, are in many ways representative of the old system of one fits all; the system under which we were content with package deals, under which a basket of goods had been selected for us by the benevolent shopkeeper. Sure, we were able to choose between different packages, but the shopping baskets on offer in the political supermarket were – and to some extend still are – essentially the same.

This system will no longer do. As individuals and as consumers we are no longer content with a system that leaves us to choose between different packages. This system of the political package deal was suited for the twentieth century when information was limited, sparse and tightly controlled by a few monopolies. But it is not suited for an age characterised by the internet, Twitter, bloggers and ‘bespoke’ consumers. And the system is especially not suited for a time when people are more and more interested in single issues, causes and individual campaigns.

More and more we sign petitions. Just consider the example of the Downing Street e-petition website launched in November 2006. In the spirit of a more technological age, Downing Street now invites visitors to its website to create online petitions on any subject. Others can add their support at the click of a mouse. Within two months of launching the initiative there were 2,860 active petitions. One partition in particular stood out. 1,274,362 ‘signatures’ were added against road pricing. The government dropped the proposal unceremoniously!² For better or for worse we live in a consultative democracy. Since 1997 there have – according to Cabinet Office figures – been more than 500 consultations per year. This means that there are 1.5 new consultations every day. This figure has continued at the same level since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government took over in 2010.³

Box 1: Boris Johnson: The phone-in primary or X-Factor politics in practice

When the Conservative Party chose Boris Johnson to be their candidate for Mayor of London in 2007 they did not select the former TV presenter in a committee room from a shortlist of members of the old boys network, though Johnson (old Etonian and Oxbridge) would have fitted the bill. Johnson was chosen by a phone-in and using the same technology as is used for wellknown shows such as X-Factor and Britain’s Got Talent. The Conservative poll was open to all Londoners, regardless of their political affiliation, who registered via a £1-a-minute phone line. So far so good, but the fact of the matter was that the turnout was rather low. Boris Johnson got an overwhelming majority of the votes (75 per cent), but only 20,019 votes out of 5.5 million registered voters.¹ That only 0.3 per cent of the registered voters bothered to take part in this radically new experiment with direct democracy provides food for thought and suggests, perhaps, that there are limits to the public enthusiasm for direct democracy.

But back to the main theme. The fact of the matter is that we now vote online and support causes – not political parties. While 75 per cent of us sign a petition every year according to Eurobarometer,⁴ the combined membership of political parties is below the total membership of The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.⁵ So while we are, in fact, more (not less!) political than ever before, we are no longer happy with the system of representative democracy has it has existed hitherto. Turnout in elections drops and we trust the system less and less. Even the government admitted as much. In a report, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown talked about ‘a collapse of trust in politics’, and went on to note that the ‘standing of politicians has never been lower’.⁶. His successor David Cameron did not disagree, and the Conservative Party put forward a number of proposals for citizen involvement, including one that proposed enabling the public to call referendums on local issues where 5 per cent of the public sign a petition – a clear intent to increase accountability in local government and redistribute power towards the public.⁷ Though in practice this proposal proved somewhat disappointing – as we shall see.

Bespoke democracy

That the government is willing to submit issues to the voters and let them have a greater input is a new development in historical perspective – at least in the United Kingdom. In a classic analysis A.H. Birch famously observed that ‘there has been no support at all for the idea that the initiative and the referendum should be adopted as a permanent institution of government, as it is in Switzerland. Views of this kind . . . have never acquired any kind of influence.’⁸ As recently as the 1990s, Tristan Garrell-Jones, then the Minister for Europe in a Conservative Government, said the very idea of a referendum ‘was an abdication of the responsibility of the House [of Commons] and of the Government of the day’.⁹

The public outcry over MPs’ expenses in the United Kingdom in 2009 made these kinds of proposals more popular. In the words of Tom Symons, as a result of the MPs’ perceived disrespect for their constituents the message is clear: ‘the public are not content with the state of representative democracy in Britain today’.¹⁰ As a result mechanisms such as legislative initiatives and a greater use of referendums have been put forward. So too have limited proposals for the recall – a mechanism which allows voters to ‘recall’ an elected representative in a special election, if enough voters sign a petition.

This appetite for – and belief in – the panacea-like virtues of direct democracy is not confined to the United Kingdom. In Canada, more precisely in Quebec, Bernard Drainville, a former Parti Quebeçois minister, is an example of a true believer in government by the people. In his view, ‘The bond of trust between the citizen and the political world is broken. It must be repaired. It’s urgent.’ His remedy is similar to the one proposed by his British colleagues, namely ‘a system of popular referendums [which] would put power back in the hands of the people. With the signatures of 15 per cent of registered voters, a referendum could be launched on any topic, including Quebec sovereignty.’ ‘When Quebecers are ready to hold a referendum on their political future, or on another issue, they will hold one,’ Mr Drainville said.¹¹

Yet the proposals put forward by politicians have tended to lack political teeth and have been watered down as they have moved closer to the Statute Book. This is perhaps not surprising. Political parties – and the ‘elite’ – have often lamented the rise of issue politics. It is as if an interest in particular causes, rather than an interest in political parties, was somehow a sign of less sophistication. In fact, it is the other way round. People have become more mature. They are more interested in the policy issues. They are no longer content with being told what to think. They want to make choices for themselves.

As in the aforementioned case of music downloads, we want to assemble our playlists in accordance with our own tastes. We no longer want to be told what to listen to. Just as we can decide to have both Mozart and AC/DC on our MP3 players, we can cherry-pick different policies from different political parties with no regard to artificial ideological coherence and tradition.

One of the reasons that mechanisms of direct democracy are so attractive is that they conform to our norms and expectations as individualised consumers. Politics being – in this author’s view – infinitely more important than the contents of our iPods, remains stuck in the consumer model of the 1950s – if not earlier.

No political system can be, will be, or ought to be, seen as legitimate if it does not conform to the norms and expectations of the citizens. Moreover, the citizens of today are increasingly individuals, who make individual choices. We see this, for example, in the concept of the so-called ‘ethical consumer’, i.e. those people who buy fair-trade coffee and the like.

This individual consumer is not merely an economic agent, but a political actor. This, indeed, is already recognised among political geographers. ‘Ethical consumption campaigns,’ argue researchers, ‘aim to provide information to people already disposed to support or sympathise with certain causes; information that enables them to extend their concerns and commitments into everyday consumption practices’.¹² That is, consumers become empowered to act ethically and politically in and through their actions as consumers. But why just rely on the market? Why not extend politics to its natural sphere, the forum, and to the world of voting and collective decision-making?

By allowing people to vote for individual issues in referendums, and indeed by allowing people to initiate votes on single issues (so called citizens’ initiatives); mechanisms of direct democracy provide a remedy for upgrading democracy. The question, of course, is if this is sustainable, if these mechanisms have any value, if they increase trust and choice, or if they – paradoxically – do the opposite, as some have suggested.¹³

It is in this context we should see the debate about direct democracy. What the debate is about is not traditional models of engagement and deliberation, though that too. What is at stake is an urgent upgrade of the political system’s hardware (its constitutional arrangements) as well as its software (the way we do politics).

Karl Marx once argued that revolutions occur when there is a discrepancy between the fundamental underlying structures of society and the political superstructure. When the economic system changes, when the way we consume, produce and interact in the marketplace evolves, then begins ‘an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.’ That is, ‘at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production’.¹⁴

Without carrying the analogy too far, we may be at a critical junction in history. The underlying structure of society, the way we think, the way we consume and so on, is out of sync with the way we govern our societies. We live in the world of the individualised consumer, of mass information and choice, yet the political structures are still those of the collectivised society of the post-Second World War era.

But, of course, we cannot simply transplant the consumer model from its natural setting into the world of politics. The task here is to inquire if a system of direct democracy would work.

To do so we need to look at the different systems of direct democracy, from the right to petition legislation (e.g. as in the case of the legislative initiative – analysed in Chapter 3 below) through more hard-hitting models like referendums, citizens’ initiatives (Chapter 2) and mechanisms for recalling elected individuals (Chapter 4). Later in the book we look at the more practical side of direct democracy, like the courts and direct democracy (Chapter 8), as well as looking at the practical rules governing the process in Chapter 9.

In between these chapters we consider case studies of citizen politics, ranging from the British AV Referendum (Chapter 7) to the Irish Referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (Chapter 6) and consider if citizens are likely to understand the issues put before them (Chapter 5). So, all in all, a pretty full menu!

The political consumer and political theory

The mechanisms on paper, at least, provide the ‘political consumer’ or ‘customer’ with the opportunity of selecting their personal choices. But this does not mean that the old system is entirely obsolete. The system of representative government is not doomed because we introduce mechanisms of direct democracy. Just as we still watch general news bulletins, buy package holidays etc., there is still a market for ‘one size fits all’ products in politics. It is just that this is not the only option. Politically – so the argument runs – we want to have our cake and eat it. Whether this is possible – or ultimately desirable – is the question that this book seeks to answer.

John Stuart Mill noted that ‘the meaning of representative government is, that the whole people, or some numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically elected by themselves, the ultimate controlling power’.¹⁵ Mill stressed the public education ‘which every citizen of Athens received from her democratic institutions’, and contrasted these engaged citizens favourably with ‘those who have done nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over the counter’. The private citizen, noted Mill, ‘is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn, principles of maxims which have for their reason of existence the common good’.¹⁶ He went on to say that from these considerations ‘it is evident that the only government which [could] fully satisfy all the exigencies of a social state, is one in which the whole people participate’.¹⁷

Yet for all his seeming enthusiasm for the edifying effects of political participation, Mill – without offering any argument in support of this – concluded that ‘since all cannot, in a community exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some very minor portions of public business, it follows that the ideal type of perfect government must be representative’.¹⁸

Was Mill right in thus going against his ideals? Like Mill, we might agree that direct democracy – or mechanisms thereof – is fine in principle but impossible to implement in practice. But the empirical evidence does not support Mill. Indeed, there is little that suggests that chaos and anarchy would result from the use of referendums, initiatives and other mechanisms of direct democracy. John Matsusaka, writing about the American experience with initiatives has found that,

The evidence to date shows that initiative states are more responsive to opinion than non-initiative states when it comes to fiscal policy, parental consent . . . it is also clear that initiative states are more responsive to public opinion about term limits. There is no valid evidence along any policy dimension that initiative states are less (or equally) responsive to opinion than non-initiative states. The only view that is currently supported by scientific evidence is that the initiative makes policy more responsive to public opinion.¹⁹

That this is the case in the US, does not, of course, imply that the same would be true in other countries. The enactment of particular public policies depends to a large extent upon political culture. But there is some evidence that referendums in other countries have some of the same effects. According to a Swiss study, the evidence suggests that,

Direct democracy is positively related to some macro-economic indicators such as low state budgets, low budget deficits and low tax levels . . . for some policies, direct democracy seems to lead to policies closer to the median voter than in purely representative democracies.²⁰

In other words, representative democracy can be complemented with, but not replaced by, mechanisms for allowing individualised political choices.

Direct democracy (i.e. allowing people to recall their MPs, propose new legislation, etc.) is not a substitute for representative democracy. It is not a system that should be used on a daily basis, but – as we shall see – a last resort: a democratic safety valve. It provides – as we shall argue – a means of rebooting the political hard disk. If all else fails, we turn off the computer and restart it. The same is true for politics.

Direct democracies come in different shapes and sizes. Opting for a referendum is the more modest approach. It is based on the premise that voters are given a second say over a policy that has typically been approved by the legislature. For example, in 2007 Irish voters were given the opportunity to vote on the Lisbon Treaty. The rationale behind this was that while more than 90 per cent of the members of the Dáil Éireann (the Irish Parliament’s first chamber) supported the Treaty, the people might not generally support their parties on this far-reaching issue. The Irish voters wanted to have their proverbial cake and eat it, and perhaps rightly so.

A majority of the voters rejected the Lisbon Treaty. Yet they continued to support their parties. This might be seen as the very justification of the referendum. The referendum is – as a matter of logic – a conservative device. It allows the voters to say no.

The rationale for this system was, of course, deeply conservative. It had long been a popular view among British theorists that change was dangerous and uncontrollable. David Hume – the Scottish philosopher – represented this view. He wrote:

It is not with government as with other artificial contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected, if we can discover another more accurate and commodious, or