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Direct Democracy In Switzerland Reviewed by Surprisingly, this is a highly readable scholarly study. Besides its merit as a description of democratic governance in Switzerland., Fossedal’s study persuasively shows that we in the United States are behind the curve in the way we do democracy. Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address of a century and a half ago affirmed our stand for a government of, by and for the people. Fossedal’s study of democracy in Switzerland makes it clear that while we may make a sustainable claim for having a government of and--less convincingly--for the people, it is not a government at the national level by the people when, in contrast to Switzerland, ordinary citizens in the U. S. have no way to establish policy or make laws directly. Having collapsed democracy, conceptually, into exclusively representative democracy, we have so much to wake up to in reading Democracy in Switzerland. And the author’s exercise is a powerful wake-up call to this end. Fossedal is not just a scholar at work in Democracy in Switzerland, but an advocate of direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy. Or more instructively,, he is an advocate of civically mature democracy which requires ordinary citizens, in a deliberative process to be directly involved in the central act of collective self-governance: establishing policy and making laws.. At the outset, I wondered: how necessary is inclusion of a history albeit brief of the Swiss people? . After reading Part 2. History, I came to see it as an asset. What were even more captivating for me were the anecdotal stories--scattered throughout the study--derived first hand by interviewing Swiss citizens and officials. These anecdotes exhibiting Swiss common sense in both attitude and in their way of doing democracy coalesce in a demonstration of Fossedal’s thesis that: “the Swiss polity, as an historical and on-going exhibit of the exercise of a deliberative direct democracy is a persuasive rebuttal to the stand of elites from the Greeks of yesterday to the elites of today who hold that exclusionary representative democracy, in itself, is a better form of democracy than a direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy....In a word, an effective rebuttal to the stand; you can’t trust the people...Switzerland answers the potential question of the political scientist or citizen: What happens if we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers?”. The book is laid out logically and invitingly in five parts: In Part 1 Conception the author gives an account of his “pilgrimage” to the town of Schwyz where the “Bundesbrief, ” the “charter of allegiance,” or the “confederation bond” entered into in 1291, is preserved. Thus at the outset, the reader is drawn into the story aspect of this scholarly study. But as noted earlier, this story aspect crops up via his many other encounters with the Swiss citizenry described. Part 2: in three relatively short chapters Fossedal covers a thousand years of Swiss history. Throughout the focus is on how the Swiss confederation formed itself first by neighbors being forced by their own internal social and political oppression to look outward and then confederating and in later times motivated to unite still more closely by the attraction of the Swiss model of a self-governing people in itself In Part 3: Institutions, Fossedal examines the Swiss Constitution, its structure, powers and procedures for its Executive, Judiciary and Parliament as well as the procedure and operation of Referendum. In Part 4 Issues: he devotes a chapter to nine major issues of social and political life. Both via anecdote and reasoning this “political journalist” lays out the case that democracy really ‘works’ when we place so much faith in the people that we make them lawmakers--together with a functionally deliberative structure in which to make laws. In Part 5 L’idee Suisse, the author does so much more than impart information and make a ‘pitch’ to the rest of democracies to follow this ‘new’ idea: Here particularly his study rivals the analysis, critique and prognosis of democracy done by de Tocqueville in mid-nineteenth century America. Among the numerous things that impressed me about Direct Democracy in Switzerland, I cite just one which underscores one of many benefits in reading it. At the head of the final chapter Fossedal states: “There is little point in studying Swiss democracy unless there is something distinctive about it--and not only distinctive, but importantly distinctive. If this is a bad assumption, then Switzerland is worth thinking about only for the specialist.” Convincingly Fossedal shows there is an importantly significant Swiss lesson for democracies worldwide in the twenty-first century: direct democracy in partnership with representative democracy works and is an idea whose time has come for us in the United States.. In fine, I wish to add: the advance in democracy, exhibited by Swiss
democratic governance and which Fossedal advocates is, in fact, embodied
in a project being sponsored in the United States by The Democracy
Foundation (TDF) today. Ordinary citizens as registered voters will
be able to vote directly in an amendatory election to put into statutory
procedure the National Initiative for Democracy (NI4D). See: www.ni4d.us.
In the interest of full disclosure I am Secretary of TDF. I can be
reached about this book review or the NI4D at email address: dkemner@ni4d.us.
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