User:Barnaby dawson/pros and cons

In 1912, the National Economic League was a prestigious organization, with headquarters in Boston. Its Executive Council included David Starr Jordan (president of Stanford University), Louis D. Brandeis (then a lawyer, but justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1916), Jacob Gould Schurman (president of Cornell University), Charles J. Bonaparte (a former U.S. attorney general) and many others of similar accomplishment. In that year, the League produced a slender volume titled 'The Initiative And Referendum: Arguments Pro And Con By A Special Committee Of The National Economic League.'  The special committee was comprised of four members who favored direct legislation and four members who opposed it.

After the main affirmative and negative presentations are made, there is a "Rebuttal For The Affirmative" written by Professor Lewis J. Johnson, in which he immediately cuts to the heart of the matter. "The sole contention of the advocates of the Initiative and Referendum is that the sovereign people, in order effectively to assert and maintain their sovereignty, must equip themselves with proper means for direct control of 'results' in lawmaking. ... This is plainly no new theory of government, but merely an attempt, by correcting a radical defect in its operating machinery, to enable our old theory actually to work. ... There can be no argument against the Initiative and Referendum that is not an argument against popular sovereignty. For to say that a sovereign people shall not adopt such measures as will give them real supremacy over legislation is obviously to contend against the sovereignty itself.  An argument openly and directly to this effect might have been ventured a century and a half ago, but it will hardly be attempted in this country today.  Our opponents, of course, make no such attempt."

Professor Johnson then re-employs the argument from the people's sovereignty to view the I&R opponents' perception of representative government. "We really want representative government; we want it efficient; we want it perfected, and we want it to be really representative. We are persuaded that the Initiative and Referendum are necessary to get it, and keep it.  Our opponents keep up the cry with which we have been mocked for decades -- that we must elect better representatives -- a thing, as a rule, clearly impossible while the present political machinery remains intact.  Our opponents, by offering no practical alternative to our proposal, force us to think that whether they are aware of it themselves or not, they do not want representative government after all, but delegated government, a mere elective oligarchy, the elective feature of which, while savoring of popular control, does not in practice bring it... .  If this diagnosis is correct, the answer to their position is the argument for popular sovereignty which we are sure we need not undertake at this date in this country."

Despite the crucial and widely held argument for the sovereign people's fundamental right to control the output of legislation, opponents continue to use criticisms of citizen lawmaking that do not defeat, diminish, or even address the people's sovereignty or their fundamental right to control the output of legislation.

In 1996, Dennis Polhill, a senior fellow at the Independence Institute, handled most of the small criticisms again when he summarized recent and extensive research: "Examination of fourteen commonly heard allegations against the initiative process finds none of them very persuasive.  Special interests do not thrive on the initiative; they find the legislature far easier to manage.  Money-power likewise gets its way more readily under the Capitol dome, not at the ballot box.   Voters are not incompetent to decide complex issues, as quantitative research has proved.  Nor are ballot measures notably less well drafted than legislative bills.  Constitutional invalidation of successful initiatives is not frequent, but very rare.   The number of initiatives on today's ballot is not unprecedentedly large. ... And voters themselves do not seem to dislike a longer ballot; turnout statistics suggest the opposite. The initiative does not benefit merely the political right or left; partisans from both sides have used it over the years. Bad ideas do not often muster the petition support to make the ballot, and they win at the polls even less often. ... Finally, the initiative process does not imply a tyranny of the majority; the US Constitution prevents that. Nor does the initiative threaten to make the legislature unnecessary, rather it supports that institution by enlisting the people to counter-balance legislative overreach and to compensate for legislative weaknesses" (Polhill, 1996).

For a compelling examination of special interests and money in the initiative process, see especially the 1999 book by Professor Elisabeth R. Gerber, The Populist Paradox.

Beyond those commonly heard allegations, there are a large number of criticisms leveled at direct democracy components that are not unique to direct democracy, but simply true of all forms of governance. For example, direct democracy is said to be open to demagoguery. Every form of government ever devised is open to demagoguery. As with other petty criticisms of this genre, the criticism from demagoguery says nothing to even approach diminishing the sovereign people's fundamental right to control the output of legislation.

Another common genre of criticism revolves around the notion that making laws for complicated situations is beyond the knowledge and understanding of most citizens. This is sophistry aimed at making people servile and submissive. As Polhill remarks, history has proven that citizen-proposed law is as carefully crafted as legislature-proposed law. The experts handle that assignment. The people -- trusting the experts, as most legislators must -- vote the issue's political level, not its details. We don't have to be rocket scientists to vote on whether the Hubble should be maintained. We don't have to be economists to vote on whether corporate welfare should be cut so that we can have national health care. As democracies have proven since ancient Athens, any 18-year-old raised in the society is capable of voting such political level desisions in complicated issues (Finley, 1973).

A third troublesome sophistry from the direct democracy opponents is that the people are so remote from each other, so unable to deliberate properly, that they give representative government conflicting instructions. The classic example used is of the people limiting taxation in one initiative and demanding an increase of spending in another. However they might pretend otherwise, the politicians have many options that would allow them to follow the sovereign people's instructions. In those states, such as California, where government does not extend cooperation to its sovereign people -- and apparently does not comprehend the cutting of non-essential costs -- the people always have the recourse to cut the legislature from bicameral to unicameral, as Nebraska citizens did in 1937.

One of the prominent advantages that direct democracy brings to governance is its tangible legitimacy. Participation is one of the principles that determines a government's legitimacy for any democratically elected, representative government. This is especially true for any government that is a constitutional combination of sovereign citizen lawmaking and representative government. In such a combined government form, the more people who participate in the resolution of a political problem, the more legitimacy the resolution has -- in the widest possible legal, political science, and historical sense.

Contrarily, in such a combined government form, legitimacy is dangerously diminshed by representative government's manipulations to reduce the number of citizens who participate in citizen lawmaking (Cyber-Federalist, Number 14, 2002 Creating The Illusion Of Legitimacy, retrieved 05 September 2004). Legitimacy is catastrophically reduced when representative government arbitrarily and unconstitutionally controls citizen-proposed law (Neitzke, 2004, State Of The Republic, chapter, "Violating Constitutions") or when it arbitrarily and unconstitutionally refuses to implement citizen-made law (Gerber, 2000).