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.

Still, Kilchberg is a fair example of how Swiss politics works at the roots. Its 7,000 people hold all power not specifically allocated to the federal or the cantonal government. It raises its own income and property taxes (in all, the comunities dispose of more than a quarter of all Swiss tax money, not all that much less than the federal government).

It runs schooling up to the age of 16, including building the the schools and choosing the committee that appoints the teachers. It distributes up to a monthly SFr3,000 ($2,370) per person to its poor—admittedly not very numerous in Kilchberg—as well as providing help to a handful of foreign refugees, mainly from Sri Lanka. It has its own volunteer fire brigade; two police boats on the lake; a couple of car-born policemen who keep an eye on illegal parking and look after the lost-and-found office; an old people’s home; and a community farm where, if the fruit-seller is out for lunch, you just leave your money on the counter.

The government of this busily innocent little place consists of a seven-person council, elected by the people, which supervises a modest staff of professionals (unlike some Gemeinden, whose part-time workers combine their work for the community with their ordinary jobs). The real power, however, is wielded by the voters who assemble up to four times a year to listen to the council’s recommendations and decide whether it is handling things properly. It is at these meetings that tax levels are fixed, new laws are passed, the community’s accounts are inspected, building regulations are decided (a crowd-drawer, this) and anything else anybody wants to bring up can be discussed.

Voting is by show of hands, but there can be a cross-on-paper vote if a third of those present demand it; they never have, so far. If somebody feels the council’s ideas are inadequate, he or she can be collecting 15 signatures insist on putting a proposed new law to the voters; it has not happened for a decade. A single person can demand some specific other action from the council, with the right, if the council does not agree, to take the matter up to the cantonal and federal levels. Only one such demand has been made in the past ten years, for the community’s farm to use organic farming methods. This smooth record suggests that Karl Kobelt, president of the council for these ten years, is a model politician of the Swiss School.

The cloud on the horizon is the fact that no more than about 400 people generally turn up at these meetings or maybe 700 when something especially exciting is on the menu. As a percentage of Kilchberg’s 4,000 or so qualified voters, that is worryingly smaller even than the quarter of the electorate the canton of Glarus brings out for its annual assembly. Nothing seems to have gone badly wrong as a result; if it had, the protests would have been heard by now. But something odd is happening when a system designed to deploy the power of the people turns out to be actually using only a tenth of that people power.

Dealing with this problem is harder for the little units of Swiss politics, which like to bring their people together for a fact-to-face talk about everything, than it is for the bigger units. The big ones, which call their people to referendums only on selected issues, and usually do the voting by post, can reduce the voting burden fairly easily—fewer mandatory referendums, suffer signature-collecting rules, and so on. That will probably get more people to vote.

To achieve the same result, unless their people rediscover a more general willingness to abandon the television set and assemble for a meeting very few months, the smaller cantons and communities may eventually have to renounce the intimacy of their talk-about-anything get-togethers, and turn to more prosaic methods of selective voting. It will be a sad loss of a vivacious piece of old-fashioned politics. But if that is the price of keeping the 21st century’s people at their democratic work, so be it.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 5 of 8)

“Most objections to direct democracy are, when you look closely, objections to democracy”

BRIAN BEEDHAM

AH YES, the objectors say at once: perhaps the Swiss can do these things, but that does not mean anybody else can; the Swiss, you see, have a unique gift for direct democracy. To which the answer is: come off it. There is nothing special about the Swiss. They are a perfectly ordinary mixture of west-central European peoples (and the fact that they are a mixture makes it harder, not easier, for them to run their country in this way). They too yawn at the blearier aspects of politics; the turnout goes down with a bump when there is nothing of particular interest on the referendum list. They too get sudden bees in the bonnet; it was the Swiss, in 1989, who asked themselves whether they should abolish their army, and found 35.6% of themselves saying yes. Here are no models of zealously dutiful civic rectitude.

If the Swiss can manage this richer form of democracy, it is not because they have always had it. There were some fine early examples of pastoral democracy high up in the Alps in the later Middle Ages. But other parts of the world have had similar things-the town meetings of New England, for instance-and it was not until the 1860s that a countrywide Swiss system of direct democracy got itself organised. Nor is the explanation that the Swiss are an especially sophisticated lot. They are now the second-richest people in Europe, and give themselves a good education; but for the first 60 or 70 years of their democratic experiment-its most vigorous period, many would say-they were largely rural, not very well-to-do, and as politically unpolished as any other people of the time.

Least of all should the Switzerland-is-special school be allowed to get away with the argument that Switzerland can do it because ‘it is such a small country, where they all know each other.’ That is half-true of the smallest cantons and communities, but nobody who knows the place would say it was true of Switzerland as a whole.

In a country with nearly 6m citizens and four different languages, the ordinary voter in Zurich knows no more about the political thought-processes of the ordinary voter in Geneva or Lugano than the New Yorker does about the San Franciscan’s, the Londoner about the Glaswegian’s. The German-speaking and French-speaking parts of the country, in particular, are quite often at angry odds with each other: the 1992 vote about membership of the European Economic Area is only one recent example. The Swiss are not a natural unity, born to chat things over easily on referendum day. Do not believe that the god of direct democracy has selected them as his chosen people.

Remember, politics is politics

The other attempts to demolish the idea of direct democracy are, with one exception, no more convincing than the notion that only the Swiss can do it. Some people argue, for instance, that letting all the voters share in the decision-making process is bound to be inefficient, because it defies the division-of-labour principle.

In the world of economics, these people explain, it would never be suggested that everybody should grow his own food, make his own shoes and construct his own lap-top computer. The sensible way to organise things is to let people specialise, so that each thing is produced by those who do it best; the consumer then has a far wider range of goods to choose from, much more cheaply. So, in the world of politics, if the specialists of the political class are allowed to get on with the complex business of decision-making, the ordinary chap will end up much better off.

To this the reply is: sorry, but politics is different from economics. The world of politics is not divided between consumers and producers (unless you agree with people like Lenin and Stalin, who thought they knew exactly what needed to be done to create a happy world, and so decreed that their Politburo should be the sole producer of political decisions). In democratic politics, everyone is a consumer, and by the same token everyone can join in the production process. There is no evidence that widening the production process to let ordinary people take part in decision-making in the years between parliamentary elections leads to a narrowing of the range of goods on offer, or increases their price. On the contrary: direct democracy seems to expand the choice, most of the newly recruited producers are happy to do their work for free, and with luck the members of parliament will cost less.

A variation of this attempt to confuse politics with economics is an argument, also used by adversaries of direct democracy, which confuses politics with science. You would not entrust your health to the advice of your next-door neighbour, runs this argument, or ask the other passengers on the train taking you to work how to set about building a nuclear reactor. You go to a doctor or a physicist, somebody trained in the science of medicine or atomic energy. So in politics you should turn to somebody who understands the science of politics-namely, your elected representative.

But politics is not a science, either. Parts of it require some detailed knowledge of various subjects, not least economics, and this is one reason why it makes sense to keep parliaments in existence, places where people are paid to burrow into such details. But the heart of democratic politics is the process of finding out which of the various possible solutions to a problem is the one most people think the best. The quickest and most efficient way of finding that out, surely, is to ask the people directly, rather than leaving the choice to a handful of parliamentarians who may well discover at the next parliamentary election that most people think they got it wrong.

The claim that there is such a thing as a science of politics is deeply revealing. Those who make it are in fact claiming that the policies they think best are the ones that should be followed, even if most of the rest of the country disagrees, because the rest of the country is ‘scientifically’ wrong. That is not unlike the sort of thing you hear from conservative mullahs in the Muslim world, who say that since politics is a branch of religion only the ‘scholars of Islam’ are equipped to puzzle out God’s political intentions. Such a claim is not just anti-direct-democracy; it is anti-democracy.

The distorting effect of money

There is a bit more substance, but only a bit, in the worry that money can shape the outcome of a referendum. When a question is put to a vote of the whole people, those whose interests are affected naturally want the vote to go their way, and are prepared to spend a lot of money on the signature-collecting and the propagandising which are designed to bring that about.

Studies in both Switzerland and those American states which use direct democracy suggest a pretty frequent link between the amount of money spent and the result of the referendum. The link is by no means always there. The Swiss took their decision about Europe even though most of the big money had been trying to persuade them to vote the other way. The voters of several American states have passed anti-gun legislation despite the gun-lobby’s opposition. Italy’s voters helped to torpedo the country’s old political system in 1991 and 1993 while the system’s two main parties watched ashen-faced. But the connection between money and votes seems persistent enough to justify concern.

There are two reasons, however, for thinking it does not decisively tilt the argument between direct and representative democracy. One is the fact that the voters can if they wish set limits on the amount of propaganda money spent at referendum time.

The Swiss have not done so, because the sums spent in Switzerland are (by American standards) still fairly small, and the Swiss do not think they have ever produced a result outrageous enough to require a remedy. The voters of California, on the other hand, in 1974 overruled the resistance of special-interest groups to pass Proposition 9, which set some firm spending limits. Proposition 9 was then squashed by the federal Supreme Court in the name of the constitutional right to freedom of speech. This November the voters of Montana had a shot at doing the same thing in a way that might escape the Supreme Court’s veto. In a direct democracy, the voters can set the rules under which referendums take place, so long as these rules respect the country’s constitution-which, in a direct democracy, the voters can themselves change.

The other reason for not letting the money issue decide the argument is that money-power almost certainly distorts the old sort of democracy more than it does the new sort. In a direct democracy, the lobbyists have to aim their money at the whole body of voters. Since most of the money is spent on public propaganda campaigns, it is hard for them to conceal what they are up to. In a representative democracy, however, the lobbyists’ chief target is much smaller-just the few hundred members of the government and the legislature-and so it is much easier for them to keep what they are doing secret. They have at their disposal a whole armoury of devices ranging from the quietly arranged free holiday in a sunny corner of the world ‘for information-gathering purposes’ through cash-with-a-wink for saying the right things in parliament to straight bribery for getting your government to order the bribe-giver’s make of aeroplane.

There have been too many recent examples of all those things all over the democratic world. This is why, when somebody says he is worried about the influence of money over referendums, the correct retort is: ‘At least you can’t bribe the whole people.’

Most of the other criticisms of direct democracy are, like this one, equally applicable to the rival version. Does a new referendum designed to solve one problem sometimes carelessly create a new problem? To be sure it does; and the same applies to many an act of parliament. Are some referendums obscurely worded? Yes, and so is some of the work of professional draftsmen; think of the Maastricht treaty. Can the man in the street be counted on to understand tricky economic issues? No, but neither, quite often, can the supposed experts; recall Britain’s doomed plunge into Europe’s exchange-rate mechanism. None of these objections is fatal. There remains, however, one genuine cause for concern about the way direct democracy works.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

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.

Neither nightmare nor dream is likely to become reality. Most ordinary men and women are probably not foolish enough to risk the first or technologically arrogant enough to believe they can manage the second. Yet between these extremes of what technology might do to politics lies some fascinating new territory, well worth exploring.

The great electronic leap forward of the 1990s (see pages 21-23) is clearly going to make it even harder for the machinery of democracy to remain in its present steam-engine stage. For the past couple of centuries–except in Switzerland, and to some extent recently in Australia and parts of the United States–democracy has meant a system by which the people vote every few years to elect a handful of representatives, who in between these elections take all the important decisions. For two reasons, this sort of democracy may no longer be sufficient. Something more direct, more fully democratic, may have to be more universally attempted – decisions by vote of the whole people:

Anti-deference, anti-lobbyist

1. Reason number one is that the gap between ordinary people and parliamentarians is far narrower now than it was in Edmund Burke’s days, and indeed for a long time after Burke. During the 20th century, most people in the democracies have become much better educated than they used to be, and much richer, and have more spare time in which to think about what goes on around them. Above all, they are on the whole a great deal better informed. First books and newspapers, then the radio, then television and now the artillery of the Internet bombard them with ideas, facts and figures. They are regularly asked what their opinion is about important matters, and their representatives in parliament know they had better pay attention to what the opinion polls report.

   This is probably the chief explanation of why politicians are currently in such bad odour in so much of the democratic world. It is not just that, as is often said, government has failed to provide what the people want. Governments have failed in some countries; in others they are doing their job with reasonable efficiency. The point is that, everywhere, ordinary people are now in a better position to examine what their representatives are up to, observe their errors, smirk or snarl about their sexual and financial peccadillos, and wonder whether it is really a good idea to let such a collection do so much of the business of politics. The people are no longer so ready to proffer the deference their representatives used to expect — and too often still do.

2. The second reason for taking a serious look at direct democracy is that it may be better than the parliamentary sort at coping with one of the chief weaknesses of late-20th-century democracy. This is democracy’s vulnerability to lobbyists. In the relatively humdrum, de-ideologised politics of post-communist days, the lobbyist is getting even more powerful than he used to be; and democrats are right to be worried.

   There is in principle nothing wrong with lobbying; the people who take decisions, in any field, should be the target of as much argument and persuasion as possible. Lobbying goes wrong when special interests use their money to cross the line between persuading politicians and buying them. In dealing with a relative handful of elected politicians, the lobbyist has many ways of doing that, ranging from “entertainment” to the straight insertion of cash into the parliamentarian’s pocket or the legal pouring of millions into the coffers of American politicians’ campaign funds. When the lobbyist faces an entire electorate, on the other hand, bribery and vote-buying are virtually impossible. Nobody has enough money to bribe everybody.

   It is true that rich propagandists, even though they cannot bribe the mass of voters, can gull them into taking foolish decisions. Silvio Berlusconi did it in Italy last Sunday (see page 51). It has happened, spectacularly, more than once in California. But the nervous can take heart from the record of Switzerland, which has long put most of its big decisions to the vote of the whole people. The Swiss have developed an admirable ability to resist the blandishments of both Big Money and cheap emotion. In particular, the fear that special interests will use direct democracy to get themselves budget-busting goodies should be eased by the fact that Switzerland has not only a tolerable budget deficit but also one of the rich world’s smaller public debts. Unless you believe that God designed the Swiss differently from everybody else, it is hard to argue that only they can do these things. The Swiss have just had more practice.

   If other countries want to move deeper into direct democracy, they should note how it is best done. Some subjects are more amenable than others to the whole-people vote. Great constitutional issues (“Do you want your country to be part of a federal Europe?”) and specific local decisions (“Shall we expand the town’s hospital or its high school this year?”) fall more naturally into this category than arcane financial measures, some of which even the Swiss treat with care. And a solid list of signatures should be needed to bring any subject to the vote.

   Nothing unconstitutional can of course be laid before the people, though the people can change the constitution if they wish. It is necessary to vote fairly frequently–the Swiss trudge to the polls four times a year–if the voters are to do their task properly (which includes learning how to spot what the selfish propagandist is up to, and correcting the voters’ own earlier mistakes without too much delay). Above all, trudging to vote is far better than just prodding a button, because it gives you more time to think. The new electronics is an excellent way of putting more information at the voters’ disposal, but it is not the best way for those voters to express the conclusion they come to. Much better, having digested the arguments for and against, that they should walk calmly to the polling station.

   [We’ve already abandoned this bucholic fantasy with mail balloting, with no apparent degradation of the process. -editor]

Done with care, direct democracy works. The more political responsibility ordinary people are given, the more responsibly most of them will vote. This helps to produce something closer to true government by the people. And that, after all, is the way the logic of the 20th century points. If democrats have spent much of the century telling fascists and communists that they ought to trust the people, can democrats now tell the people themselves that this trust operates only once every few years?

THE ECONOMIST