Comment by esarbe
5 years ago
Konkordanz is very important in Switzerland. A few years ago the SVP - the biggest party by active membership in Switzerland - proclaimed to act as an opposition party from that point forth.
They where thoroughly ridiculed; there is no place for an opposition party in Switzerland, since all the major parties are part of the Executive Directorate, where the seven seats of the directorate are apportioned vaguely proportional to voter share (although there's a log of haggling involved and you need to get the minor parties to agree to chip in, since the Directorate is confirmed by the Parliament).
I do also think that it would be helpful to adopt similar power-sharing directorates instead of presidential systems where one party dominates and the other parties try to sabotage everything they do. Switzerland's system involves a lot of bickering and can be slow sometimes, but I do think it better than the back-and-forth of presidential democracies.
I'm German so I live in a democracy with proportional representation and coalition governments. For the last years we had a coalition between labour and conservatives, with conservatives being the larger party. That setup was kind of the result of fragmentation in the political spectrum, that makes forming a "polar" government (left/right) a lot more difficult. Overall this center-government is quite popular, but sometimes gets a little lost on individual issues where referendum might help. And getting all parties included into that coalition government (that would be the Konkordanz setup roughly) seems like a no-brainer to me.
I think for years I was sceptical of direct democracy elements due to really bad decisions having been made in referendums across the globe. But nowadays I feel like it might also have to do with the lack of frequence in referendums. I.e. the Brexit-referendum was the rare occasion of a referendum, thus a lot of other issues unloaded in that referendum. If more referendums on various policies had been conducted before, the Brexit referendum might have turned out differently due to a reduced overall frustration about participation in policy-decision making.
Counterexample might be the state of california with many direct-democratic elements and regular ballot votes on many issues. I don't see it generating a lot of cooperative behaviour among the elected officials in california.
I agree; you cannot expect the voters to just once make a decision and then get it right.
The Brexit referendum is for me the worst possible example of how to do direct democracy; facultative with a vague question and once-in-a-lifetime. That's just not going to work. If a referendum is facultative, why even bother? If it is a vague question, what exactly voting are they for and if it is once-in-a-lifetime, how can you expect the people to actually vote on the issue at hand instead of just making a protest vote?
For a direct democracy to be working properly (and I don't propose that it's working properly in Switzerland!) you need to have an engaged populate that has built up a culture of participation, that know these referendums will have an impact and that their decision will not just be overruled by the political elite.
I don't know much about the political situation in the state of California. But honestly; the political system in the U.S.A to me seems just plain broken at this point in time.