Category Archives: Economist Magazine

Why the time for change has come – The Economist 12/21/96

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A Survey of democracy: Happy 21st century, voters! (part 7 of 8)

“In an equal and electronic world, the unequal old steam-engine won’t work”

BRIAN BEEDHAM

THE argument for direct democracy is not just a matter of beating off the mostly unconvincing objections its opponents throw at it. The bigger part of the argument consists of pointing out that the world has changed hugely since the other version of democracy, the representative sort, first came into widespread use in the 19th century. These changes make the vote-every-few-years brand look increasingly unworkable, and strengthen the claim to workability of the emerging alternative.

The idea that government by the people really meant no more than letting the people from time to time elect a legislature and perhaps a president who between elections would take all the real decisions may have had a certain plausibility in the 19th century and the first part of the present century. Even then, the Swiss were unpersuaded: they got their referendum system going 130 years ago, and it worked fine. But for most people in those days it seemed important that only a small part of the population had a decent education, plenty of money, ready access to information about public affairs, and enough leisure to put that information to responsible use. Let this minority therefore provide the political class which would do most of the serious work, while the poor and relatively ignorant majority contented itself with the occasional broad choice between This Lot and That Lot.

That was the reasoning behind the idea of representative democracy. It was an over-simplification even in the 19th century, in the judgment of men as different as a conservative novelist like Anthony Trollope and Keir Hardie, the founder of Britain’s Independent Labour Party. By the end of the 20th century, it has become untenable.

The table on this page illustrates the economic and social upheaval the richer part of the world has gone through in the past 100 years. A century ago, the average Briton and American produced an annual GDP of only $ 4,200 and $ 4,500 respectively at today’s prices; today, the Briton’s great-grandchild produces more than four times that much and the American’s almost six times (and the growth in many other countries, such as Italy, has been even faster). A century ago, few people got a proper education: only one child in France, for instance, went to a secondary school compared with every 60 who do so now, and only one went on to college or university for every 50 who do now; and the spread of learning has been even more spectacular in, for instance, Japan.

These things have enabled the average citizen of the rich world to save much more money than he could even 60 years ago, and thus to expand his ownership of shares, housing, cars or whatever. Meanwhile the amount of time he has to spend at work has considerably diminished, leaving him more time to take an intelligent interest, if he wishes, in the way his country is governed. To do that he has at his disposal not only the enormous expansion of newspaper circulation that began a century ago but also the 20th-century innovations of mass radio and television and, the latest arrival, a 34,000% increase in the number of networks linked to the Internet in the United States and a 27,000% increase elsewhere in the world in the past eight years alone.

This is a revolution, and it would be extraordinary if such a revolution did not rattle the foundations of a political system based on pre-revolutionary assumptions. The rattling of representative democracy would presumably have started years ago if it had not been delayed by the cold war. The self-discipline required by the struggle against communism made the democracies reluctant to think of changing their own political arrangements; so the half-way-house sort of democracy erected in the 19th century lasted longer than it would otherwise have done. But once the cold war had loosened its grip, things were bound to start changing.

As good as you are

One sign of the change is already clear. By the late 1990s, many people have come to realise that they are as well (or as badly) equipped to make most political decisions as the men and women they elect to represent them. They have as much education, nearly as much access to the needed information, and as big a stake in getting the judgments right; if they give a question their attention, they can usually offer a sensible answer. The longer the past half-century’s economic expansion can be prolonged, and the wider the information revolution extends its embrace, the larger the proportion of the population of which all that will be true.

The ordinary man no longer feels, as his grandfather felt, that his representative is a genuinely superior fellow. Indeed, the huge new flow of information that has become available to ordinary people by grace of electronics in the second half of the 20th century has made it painfully clear that those representatives are not at all superior. They are as capable of laziness, stupidity and dishonesty as the ordinary man. That may have been true a century ago, too. The difference is that then it was not generally realised; now it is.

Even a dozen years ago, it was hard to imagine that Italy’s whole parliamentary edifice was about to be brought crashing to the ground because its corruption had become public knowledge and Italians were horrified by what they had discovered. At the end of 1996, Belgians are wondering whether something almost as bad may have happened in their country in the past few years. These are extreme cases. But in many other countries the voters no longer extend to the politicians as much trust and respect as they once did. Opinion polls in America, Britain, France and elsewhere all make the same point: people nowadays look on their representatives with a disillusioned eye. That is the result of the past century’s economic and social equalisation, and of the fact that a richer and better-educated electorate can now keep a pretty constant eye on most of its politicians’ activities.

The end of the cold war has brought another change, and this one too suggests that democracy needs modernising. The disappearance of communism has greatly reduced the ideological content of politics. The shaping power of ideas has not entirely vanished, of course. A recognisable post-cold-war frontier is starting to emerge between a new left and a new right in the debate about the competing claims of efficiency and compassion, the proper functions of government, the best economic way to pay for sickness and old age, and so on. But these are nuances compared with the thunderous old battles between socialism and individualism, between the command economy and the free market. This dilution of ideology has two consequences.

One is that the agenda of politics, the list of decisions to be taken, has grown much more prosaic. The choice at voting time is no longer even in theory a choice between two radically different bodies of ideas. It is a series of selections among relatively small differences of opinion about the details of economic management and fairly minor disagreements over the amount and direction of public spending. This is not the sort of thing that is best presented to the voters once every few years in the parliamentary-election programmes of competing parties. That is like being told to do your supermarket shopping in one half-hour trip every half-decade. The modern agenda of politics is much better handled by the regular routine of visits to the voting centre that is offered by direct democracy.

The other effect of the fading of ideology is that political parties are losing their old power. This is important because parties-the things you vote for or against on parliamentary-election day, and the building-blocks of the governments thus created-are keen supporters of representative democracy. Their existence largely depends on it. They therefore oppose direct democracy. In post-cold-war politics, however, the parties can no longer claim to be carrying banners inscribed with the name of a great idea that unites a whole segment of humanity. As the banners are lowered, the loyalties that used to hold the parties together begin to dissolve; people move more readily from one party to another; parties become woollier, weaker things. As they lose their old clout, they can no longer put up so much resistance to the modernisation of democracy. These days, voters do not need a special class of people called politicians to interpret their wishes; they have learned that politicians are a rather unreliable lot; and the trade unions into which the politicians have organised themselves, the political parties, are growing feebler. Between them, those three facts can push open the door to direct democracy.

ALL IS CHANGED

GDP per head, dollars* 1900 1995

Britain 4,200 18,900

Canada 3,000 19,200

Italy 1,400 19,000

United States 4,500 26,700

Educational Enrolments (thousands) 1900 1995

France

Secondary 98 5,822

Higher 30 1,526

Japan

Secondary 121 11,288 (1)

Higher 25 2,139 (1)

United States

Secondary 519 17,117 (2)

Higher 238 14,120 (2)

Savings per head, dollars* 1930 1995

Britain 170 1,500

United States 140 950

Britain 54 43

Canada 57 39

United States 53 42

Internet – number of connected networks** 1988 1996 (2)

United States 301 104,000

Non-US 33 91,000


*1995 prices and exchange rates (1) 1992 (2) Projected
** Separate groups of linked computers that can share information
Sources: The Economist; International Labour Organisation; Internet Society; national statistics; OECD

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

The end of a dividing line – The Economist 12/21/96

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

BRIAN BEEDHAM

IT WOULD be wrong, however, to rest the case for direct democracy on utilitarian grounds alone. To vote directly on the issues of the day is more efficient than to delegate the issue-deciding job to a bunch of representatives, because it almost certainly provides more people with more of what they want at little or no extra cost. But it also does something else. By giving ordinary people more responsibility, it encourages them to behave more responsibly; by giving them more power, it teaches them how to exercise power. It makes them better citizens, and to that extent better human beings. It improves the producers as well as the product.

Getting more out of democracy, and out of the people who are supposed to be the operators of democracy, was bound to take time. For most of history most of mankind has been poor, ignorant and timid. It has not been hard for the minority who had some money, a sword and the rudiments of knowledge to persuade everybody else (and often themselves too) that they were the only ones fitted to take the decisions of government.

The turning-point came with the Reformation, which declared that every individual is directly responsible to God for his own life, and does not need a priestly class to tell him how to conduct that life. It then became possible for people to start working out the secular deduction from that religious premise. That too happened horribly slowly. But, two or three centuries after the Reformation, it was coming to be seen that equality before God must imply equality in the running of earthly affairs too.

Even then, this realisation had a hard time overcoming the self-interest of those who wanted to insist that they knew best how to run things. In particular, it was hindered by a damaging by-product of the Enlightenment, the next great sharpening of consciousness after the Reformation.

The Enlightenment was a necessary reassertion of the power of reason after too many centuries in which dogma had too often suppressed reason. The trouble was that this reassertion of reason tempted some people to think that reason could produce a scientific answer to every problem, including all the problems of politics. The most spectacular victims of the temptation of scientific certainty were the communists, who were so certain of the rightness of what they planned to do that they saw no need to consult anybody else at all. But a milder version of the temptation still tugs at other politicians. It is why so many of them still claim to possess a special skill which enables them to decipher what the incoherent voters are unable to say clearly: why, in short, they reckon they should be left in charge of the decision-making process.

Self-government and self-discipline

If you believe in democracy at all, it is hard to see why in most democratic countries the proceedings of democracy should still be divided between, on the one side, a few hundred people who take all the detailed political decisions and, on the other, the vast mass who walk down the road once every few years, push a button or mark a cross in a square, and then walk home again. Democracy, after all, assumes the basic equality of all grown-up human beings. Yet the overwhelming majority of these beings are still expected to be content with an occasional vote for a party some of whose proposals the voter agrees with, but others he doesn’t; then a wait of several years to see whether the winning party does what it has said it will do, and whether it does the right bits; and after that another stab in the dark to find out whether this time more voters can get a little more of what they actually want.

It is unlikely that the 21st century will put up with this for long. Of course, the fuller form of democracy, the one in which the voters directly take the decisions they want to take, will put down its roots only in places where the soil is ready.

The soil will generally be readiest in countries where economic and educational equalisation has made a special class of politicians largely unnecessary: which means, at first, chiefly in the countries around the North Atlantic. Even in these countries, parliaments will continue to exist; there is still plenty of useful work for a parliament to do once it has accepted that the people have a right to act over its head. And, if the new direct democrats of the 21st century learn from the experience of late-20th-century Switzerland, they will concentrate their referendum-voting work on things that really matter, by limiting the number of minor issues that parliament has willy-nilly to send to the voters and by tight signature-collecting rules for the referendums the voters can impose on parliament. Like all good things, direct democracy needs self-discipline.

If it is done right, though, it could finally remove one of the oldest and deepest of the dividing lines that run through mankind. So far, the business of government has always separated those who do the governing from those who are governed, the rulers from the ruled. The invention of democracy healthily blurred that distinction. But it did not wholly expunge it, so long as it limited the democracy’s voters to the subordinate role of saying every now and again which of various groups of politicians they on the whole preferred to the other groups.

The dividing line is bad for those on both sides of it. It is bad for the minority who hold most of the real power, because they can conceal what they are doing with their power, and can therefore be corrupted by it. It is bad for the majority, because it confines them to the generalities of politics and discourages them from voting with a proper, detailed sense of responsibility; that makes them superficial, careless and increasingly cynical. The division can now be removed. The idea that the people should govern themselves can at last mean just that.

© 1996 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved

The future of democracy – The Economist 6/17/95

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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

A better way to vote – The Economist 9/11/93

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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.

In crude terms, this overdue change is a shift from “representative democracy” to “direct democracy”. The basis of modern democracy is the proposition that every adult person’s judgment about the conduct of public affairs is entitled to be given equal weight with every other person’s. However different they are from each other – financially, intellectually, in their preference between Schubert and Sting-all men and women have an equal right to say how they wish to be governed. The concept sprang originally from the Protestant Reformation, which declared that everybody was equal in his dealings with God. The political offspring of that religious declaration is now accepted everywhere in the world, at least in principle, except among diehard Leninists and conservative Muslims. (The Muslim exception could be the cause of the world’s next great ideological confrontation.)

In most places where it is practised, however, democracy is in a condition of arrested development. Every adult person exercises his or her political right every few years, in elections by which the voters send their representatives to an elected assembly; but in the intervals between elections – which can mean for anything up to about seven years – it is these representatives who take all the decisions. This is not what ancient Athenians meant by democracy.

Some countries do it differently. The most clear-cut example is Switzerland’s system of direct democracy. In Switzerland it is possible to insist, by collecting a modest number of signatures, that any law proposed by the government must be submitted to a vote of the whole people. Even better, you can also insist (by getting more signatures) that a brand-new idea for a law must be put to the people even if government and parliament are against the idea.

Australia and some of the western parts of the United States also now use referendums in a fairly regular way. There have even started to be referendums in Europe outside Switzerland–the politicians in Italy, France, Denmark and Ireland have all consulted their people within the past year or so–though only on subjects of the government’s choice, and when the government thinks it dare not deny the people the final word. But elsewhere democracy is still stuck at a half-way house, as it were, in which the final word is delegated to the chosen few.

The do-it-yourself way

There are three reasons for thinking that this is going to change. One is the growing inadequacy of representative democracy. It has long been pointed out that to hold an election every few years is not only a highly imprecise way of expressing the voter’s wishes (because on these rare election days he has to consider a large number of issues, and his chosen “representative” will in fact not represent him on several of them) but is also notably loose-wristed (because the voter has little control over his representative between elections). Now the end of the battle between communism and pluralism will make representative democracy look more unsatisfactory than ever.

This is because the removal of the ideological component has changed the agenda of politics, in a way that has a worrying consequence. The old central question that is asked at election-time–Which of these two incompatible systems of politics and economics do you prefer, and how does your preference bear upon the decisions that must now be taken?–has disappeared. What is left of the agenda of politics is, by comparison, pretty humdrum. It deals for the most part with relatively minor differences of opinion over economic management, relatively small altercations over the amount and direction of public spending, and so on. The old war of principle, the contest between grand ideas, is over. The new politics is full of dull detail.

It is therefore ideal ground for that freebooter of the modern political world- -the lobbyist. The two most dramatic things that have happened to the developed world since the end of the second world war–its huge increase in wealth, and its explosion of information technology–have had as big an effect on politics as they have had on everything else. The lobbyists, the people who want to influence governments and parliaments on behalf of special interests, now command more money than they ever did before. They also have at their disposal a new armoury of persuasion in the computer, the fax machine, and the rest of it.

In the new agenda of politics, where so much depends upon decisions of detail, the power of the lobbyist can produce striking results. It will at times be, literally, corrupting. But even when it is not as bad as that it will make representative democracy seem increasingly inadequate. The voter, already irritated at having so little control over his representatives between elections, will be even angrier when he discovers how much influence the special-interest propagandists are now able to wield over those representatives. An interloper, it will seem, has inserted himself into the democratic process. The result is not hard to guess. The voter is liable to conclude that direct democracy, in which decisions are taken by the whole people, is better than representative democracy, because the many are harder to diddle–or to bribe–than the few.

This conclusion will be reinforced by the second reason for thinking there is going to be a change in the way democracy works. This is that there is no longer so much difference, in wealth or education, between voters and their elected representatives as there was in the 19th century, when democracy first took widespread root. It used to be argued that the ordinary man’s role in politics had to be confined to the periodic election of representatives whose views he broadly agreed with, because the ordinary man was not equipped to take the hard, practical decisions of government (as those representatives, it was blithely assumed, were). A century ago there was some thing in this. There is far less now.

A hundred years ago fewer than 2% of Americans aged between 18 and 24 went to university; now more than a quarter do. The share of the British population that stayed in education beyond the age of 15 rose sevenfold between 1921 and 1991; in the western part of Germany, between 1955 (when the country was still recovering from Hitler’s war) and today, the increase has been almost double that. The spread of education has been accompanied by an equally dramatic increase in wealth. In 1893 American GNP per head was $4,000 at today’s prices; a century later it is $24,000. The average Briton’s income has quintupled in real terms since the beginning of the century. The average West German’s has more than quadrupled in the past half-century alone. Bigger incomes bring bigger savings, so more people own houses or shares or whatever. And the rising totals have been accompanied by a more even distribution of prosperity. “We are all middle-class now.” Not quite; but we are surely heading that way.

The democracies must therefore apply to themselves the argument they used to direct against the communists. As people get richer and better educated, a democrat would admonishingly tell a communist, they will no longer be willing to let a handful of men in the Politburo take all the decisions that govern a country’s life. The same must now be said, with adjustment for scale, about the workings of democracy. As the old differences of wealth, education and social condition blur, it will be increasingly hard to go on persuading people that most of them are fit only to put a tick on a ballot paper every few years, and that the handful of men and women they thereby send to parliament must be left to take all the other decisions.

People are better equipped for direct democracy than they used to be. The altered character of post-cold-war politics increases the need for direct democracy. And then comes the third reason for believing that change is on the way. The waning of ideology weakens the chief source of opposition to the new sort of democracy.

When the party’s over

This opposition comes from the political parties that have grown up under representative democracy, since these have most to lose from changing to a different system. Parties are almost indispensable for the holding of elections, and they are the building-blocks of the parliaments chosen by elections. The introduction of direct democracy would instantly diminish the importance both of elections and of parliaments, since most big decisions would be taken by referendum, in a vote of the whole people. Parliaments and parties would not cease to exist; even in the fairly thoroughgoing Swiss form of direct democracy, they survive as partners of the referendum. But they would lose much of their old grandeur. The “representatives of the people” would perform that function only on the people’s daily sufferance. This is why most political parties do not like direct democracy.

But they now have less power to resist it, because the end of the cold war has taken away part of the authority they possessed in the old era of ideological confrontation. Then, parties were the spokesmen of one or other of the two grand ideas, or of some variant of one of those ideas. They could also claim to or were accused of being, the instrument of a social class, a subdivision of mankind easily recognisable (it was thought) to those who belonged to it. It was in large part these things that gave parties their sense of identity, and enabled them to demand the loyalty of their supporters.

Now, in post-cold-war politics, much of this is disappearing. There are no longer heroic banners to be borne aloft in the name of ideology. In the wealthier parts of the world, at any rate, class divisions are steadily losing their meaning. In the prosaic new politics, many of the issues that have to be decided are matter-of-fact ones, requiring little excitement. In these conditions fewer people will feel the need to belong to parties, and people will more easily shift from one party, to another. This will make the parties weaker. And that will make it harder for them to oppose radical innovations–such as the bold step forward to direct democracy.

Politics is not about to become utterly homogeneous. In the luckier parts of the world, there will still be a difference between people who think that the most important thing is to make the economy work as efficiently as possible (who will tend to band together)and people who prefer to concentrate on looking after the unfortunates who get least benefit from this efficiency (who will form another band). In unluckier places, nationalism and religion will continue to provide the driving-force of political parties. The survival of religious politics, for instance in the Islamic world, will remind us that ideology has not been abolished; the fact that one ideological beast has just died, in Moscow, does not mean the breed is globally extinct. But, where nationalism and religion are not the dominant issues, it should be possible to reorganise politics in a less party-controlled, less vote-once-every-x-years, way: in short, in a more directly democratic way. Of course, the move from a looser form of democracy to this more developed variety has to be made with care. It requires the ordinary voter to become more knowledgeable about a wide variety of subjects, and to use his judgment responsibly. It will take time for him to learn how to do it well. But a look at Switzerland, the country with the most systematic experience of direct democracy, suggests that the change presents no insuperable difficulty. The best subjects on which to start mass voting are, oddly, those at opposite ends of the spectrum of possibilities. At one end, broad questions about a country’s future course of development — constitutional issues–are manifestly the sort of thing to be decided by universal vote. The governments of France, Denmark and Ireland correctly allowed their people to decide by referendum whether they approved of the Maastricht treaty on European union; the other members of the EC should have done the same, as a majority of voters in most of them plainly wished. Constitutional amendments in the United States could in future be made, or rejected, by referendum.

At the other end of the spectrum, the small, specific decisions of local government–Do you want to add a wing to the local school, or should the money go on road improvement instead?–are equally suitable for direct vote. In both cases, the voter can almost certainly understand the question that is laid before him, and answer it competently.

The difficult area lies in between. Opponents of direct democracy argue that the ordinary voter should not be asked to decide about matters which either (a) have a large emotional content or (b) are too intellectually complex for “ordinary people”, especially if the complexity is of the financial sort. For both of those purposes, they say, the people’s elected representatives can be trusted to do the job better. In fact, the Swiss experience tends to contradict this cynicism about the potential sophistication of the voters. In the 1960s the Swiss had an attack of the xenophobia that has since affected s o many other Europeans. Strong passions were aroused. There were too many foreign workers in the country; jobs were being taken away from honest Swiss. And yet, after a long battle involving several referendums, the result was surprisingly restrained. A limit was set on the total number of foreigners who could come to work in Switzerland, but the limit was only a little below the number actually in the country at the time. Even more strikingly, the measure was framed so as to permit a subsequent rise in the total. Today, a quarter of a century later, almost 27% of the country’s workforce, and more than a sixth of the total population, is non-Swiss.

More hesitantly, Switzerland has also pushed direct democracy into the field of taxation and public spending. The Swiss system does not in theory provide for referendums on financial matters. But it has been possible to get around this difficulty by the device known as the “initiative”. In Switzerland, if you can get 100,000 signatures on a petition, you can insist that any proposal you feel strongly about must be put to the people’s vote.

It was by this means that, in June this year, a group of Swiss took to the country their proposal that the country’s armed forces should be denied authority to buy any new military aircraft for the rest of the century. The proposal had the double attraction of saving a large amount of public money and of appealing to post-cold-war anti-militarism; nevertheless, it was defeated. It was also this year that the Swiss agreed, by referendum, to an increase in Switzerland’s petrol tax. These two recent examples make the point. Direct democracy can deal with complex matters responsibly, even when they affect the voter’s pocket.

Deciding things by vote of the whole people is not, to be sure, a flawless process. The voter in a referendum will find some of the questions put to him dismayingly abstruse (but then so do many members of parliament). He will be rather bored by a lot of the issues of post-ideological politics (but then he can leave them for parliament to deal with, if he is not interested enough to call for a referendum). He will be subjected, via television, to a propaganda barrage from the rich, high-tech special-interest lobbies (but he is in one way less vulnerable to the lobbyists’ pressure than members of parliament are, because lobbyists cannot bribe the whole adult population).

On the other hand, direct democracy has two great advantages. It leaves no ambiguity about the answer to the question: What did the people want? The decisions of parliament are ambiguous because nobody can be sure, on any given issue, whether a parliamentary majority really does represent the wishes of a majority of the people. When the whole people does the deciding, the answer is there for all to see. Second, direct democracy sharpens the ordinary man’s sense of political responsibility. When he has to make up his own mind on a wide variety of specific issues–the Swiss tackled 66 federal questions by general vote in the 1980s, hundreds of cantonal ones and an unknown number (nobody added them up) of local-community matters– he learns to take politics seriously. Since the voter is the foundation-stone of any sort of democracy, representative or direct, anything that raises his level of political efficiency is profoundly to be desired.

This move forward by democracy will not happen at the same speed all over the world. It is certainly not yet feasible in the new democracies of Africa and southern Asia. The new system requires the voters not only to be fairly well-educated and reasonably well-informed, but also to have a big enough share of material prosperity to understand why they are responsible for their country’s future. Those conditions do not yet apply in much of Africa and Asia. Nor, quite possibly, will it happen very quickly in the Confucian region of eastern Asia. There the local 20th-century experiments with democracy still operate in a culture that pays great respect to the idea of authority, and respect for authority does not sit easily with the general sense of individual self-sufficiency required by direct democracy.

But in the heartland of democracy–meaning in North America and in Europe at least as far east as Budapest, Warsaw and Tallinn–the move should now be possible. Here, at any rate, the least bad form of government yet invented by man can advance from its present half-way house to something more like full application of the democratic principle.