A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 2 of 8)
Take Switzerland for both a model and a warning
BRIAN BEEDHAM
THE first lesson from Switzerland is that direct democracy is hard work. The second is that, though it makes politicians less important than they like to be, it does not remove the need for an intelligent parliament; the system works most efficiently when politicians stop assuming they know best, but do their proper job with modest zeal.
This proper job, as with any parliament, is to sit down, discuss the problems of the day, and propose solutions for them. The difference in a direct democracy is that the parliament's solutions are not necessarily the last word in the matter until the next general election, which may be years away. In Switzerland, 50,000 signatures on a petition, a bit over 1% of the current total of qualified voters, are enough to haul any new countrywide law before a vote of the whole people. Twice that number of signatures will put a brand-new idea for a law to the people's decision, even if parliament wants nothing to do with it. Because of a Swiss quirk, new federal laws coming from outside parliament have to take the form of amendments to the constitution, with the result that Switzerland's constitution has come to look like an over-stuffed cupboard; but there is no reason why the same process could not put such new laws on the ordinary statute-book, as happens in many American states and in most of Switzerland's own cantons.
A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 4 of 8)
The places where you realise what a sense of community means
KILCHBERG, a community of 7,000 people, sits n a hillside that slopes sharply down to the southern shore of the lake of Zurich. It would not be fair to call it a typical specimen of the 3,000-odd Gemainden (communes in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, comuni in the Italian part) which are the foundation of the country’s politics. Most of its people are comfortably well-off, many of them refugees from the higher taxes of the next-door community, the city of Zurich; less than a quarter are native citizens of Kilchberg. Only about 100 of the 7,00 are employed. From the graveyard of the Reformed church at the top of the hill the mortal remains of Thomas Mann and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer look out on a summer’s day at the silent snows of the mountains of eastern Switzerland.
HERE is the nightmare. A country, having succumbed to the lure of electronic democracy, and duly wired its voters into the Internet, decides that it will henceforth make its laws by letting anybody who so desires send a proposal into the information highway, after which every adult citizen will be invited to vote on these ideas, each Saturday evening. On Friday night a race riot in, say, Bradford--or Buffalo or Beziers or Boohum--kills half a dozen white people. The Internet hums, the e-mail crackles. Zap comes next day's empurpled answer: out with all Pakistanis/Hispanics/Algerians/Turks.
[Electronic voting need not be "instant". It can follow prescribed rules for deliberation. The US Congress has had electronic voting for 2 decades, and nobody says this has made them move too fast. - editor] And here is the rose-tinted dream. The people's elected representatives, having yet again failed to balance the budget, suddenly realise that the sensible thing to do is to put the problem to the people themselves. All the various possibilities are electronically presented to the voters. The voters express their assorted preferences. The contradictions in their answers are laid out for their further examination. They vote again. After a couple of months or so of furrowed-brow button-pressing, bingo, a budget virtuously balanced to the majority's satisfaction.
The Economist of London 9/11/93 on direct democracy and its success in Switzerland
A better way to vote: Why letting the people themselves take the decisions is the logical next step for the West
by Brian Needham, associate editor of The Economist and its foreign editor from 1964 to 1989.
THE difference between today's politics and the politics of the coming century is likely to be a change in what people mean by "democracy": to be precise, a radical change in the process by which the democratic idea is put into practice.
The collapse of communism, everybody agrees, removes the ideological framework that has shaped the politics of the 20th century. One of the two great rival bodies of ideas has been defeated, and the other will be transformed by the consequences of its victory. This does not mean that the world is now wholly non-ideological; there will be other ideas in the name of which politicians will call upon people to follow them into the good fight. But the end of communism, and of the special sort of confrontation it produced, both reinforces the need for a change in the way democracy works and, at the same time, gets rid of a large obstacle in the path to that change.