The Cold War is over, the internet is everywhere, and the wave of democracy, proclaimed by Ronald Reagan in 1982 - in a visionary speech before the British parliament -- covers nearly all the globe. Yet there’s a restless impatience with “professional politicians,” the role of money in politics, and the unresponsiveness of elites - elected and otherwise - that pervades much of democratic society.

Could one key answer to these evils be direct democracy - the practice of citizens voting on laws, and even writing them, as in the referendum and initiative process used in some U.S. states and in the highly developed system of Switzerland? Is direct democracy, in any case, the wave of the future - an emerging fact that political and other elites will have to respond to? And if so, where can we expect the next advances?

In recent decades, some of the powerful analysis of world-historical issues like this has been the work of Brian Beedham, senior editor of The Economist® of London, and for a quarter century its foreign editor. Beedham’s September, 1993 essay, “A better way to vote - Why letting the people themselves take the decisions is the logical next step for the West,” is, for example, already something of a modern classic in the Tocquevillean tradition.

Recently Beedham discussed the state and the future of direct democracy with Tocqueville’s Gregory Fossedal, who himself has had something to say about the future of democracy in The Democratic Imperative and elsewhere. We believe you’ll find it a stimulating encounter between two cutting-edge thinkers.

Ken Brown,
President, AdTI

Fossedal - How do you see the state of direct democracy around the world? Has it been advancing?

Beedham - I think direct democracy has had a very good period in the last 25 years, but no great development from that in the last 5 or 6 years. By that I mean that, it spread at the state level, in the United States for instance. In the U.S., its use has been strong, at least over the last 25 years, and probably over the last 50 years. It’s been somewhat more active in Australia.

More important, perhaps, it has spread, to some extent, in Europe in the last 15 to 20 years. I don’t think it’s made any strong advance in the last 5 years, but then, as times go, historically, this is not a long period. I think it’s going to take some time before we see a really big extension of it.

The conditions of the post-Cold-War world, I think, mean that more people will start getting interested in the idea of direct democracy, and we shall see an expansion of it over the next 20, 30, 40 years.

Fossedal - Are there particular regions, or economic or social conditions, that make it likely that in this spot or that spot we are likely to see the next outbreak or the next steps for direct democracy?

Beedham - Well, let me begin by reviewing the one or two things that I think are desirable, it not absolutely essential, conditions for direct democracy.

I think that it is very useful, first, to have a substantial part of the population which is reasonably well educated - can read, can absorb facts and figures and think things through. And secondly, it’s desirable to have a reasonably high proportion of the population which feels economically independent or at least partly independent. In other words, the ideal constituency of a direct democracy is a people who are willing to speak for themselves and, as it were, defy the politicians when necessary, and have got the intellectual ability and the means of knowledge which enable them to do that.

So, I think what is going to happen in the next generation or so is that, the end of the Cold War having removed one major adversary of democracy, democracy is going to spread to quite a few parts of the world it hasn’t been in before - and in those parts of the newly democratic world which have got a reasonably good sized middle class, and good education systems, and a substantial number of people who feel confident enough to take this responsibility on their shoulders, you will see this demand for direct democracy, rather than relying upon inadequate and sometimes corrupt politicians, taking root.

Where? Well, parts of Eastern Europe are certainly a candidate for that. I’m not sure about Russia itself, but certainly Eastern Europe up to Russia. Possibly parts of Latin America; I’m not quite so sure about that, but possibly.

I feel that this could come up in India, which has been a reasonably well-working democracy for 50 years now. The Indians are a very individualist people, self-reliant - hitherto, many of them very poor and very badly educated, but if the Indian economy starts to improve, there will be - there already is, but there will continue to be - an expanding middle class. I think that the Indian culture is one which could well produce direct democracy.

Maybe Southeast Asia: Highly intelligent people, levels of education rising very fast, quite good economies. However, in that part of the world, direct democracy has to compete with the Confucian view of the world which places a lot of emphasis on authority. But there, my guess is that perhaps the desire for authority will gradually give way to a responsible, well-educated middle class to start saying what it wants, how it wants to be governed.

Africa, I feel rather pessimistic about, I confess. I would make no prophecies about African politics for some time ahead, including direct democracy.

Conceivably, even some parts of the Moslem world, although that is another crossed-finger situation.

Fossedal - Islam has shown it can co-exist with democracy, but it’s far from embracing it so far.

Beedham - Yes. I think Eastern Europe is a good bet, some parts of Southeast Asia, and quite possibly India, South Asia.

Fossedal - As you were going through the list, I was thinking about cases where states are actually being built. For example, in Korea. Even though the conditions, certainly in North Korea, might not be optimal for direct democracy to smoothly evolve, direct democracy might be a tool where countries are trying to legitimize a new order, really to build a new state. The EU, and even Latin American integration, might be other examples. You could almost see direct democracy as a kind of diplomatic or development tool.

Beedham - You could. My guess is that in South Korea, for some time ahead, the opposition from the politicians is going to be pretty strenuous. And South Korea does have a history, over the last 40-50 years, of pretty centralized, authoritarian rule - shall we say, of holding elections, but with the politicians keeping a tight grasp on things between elections, and sometimes manipulating the elections.

And North Korea, which will come into some kind of all-Korean political entity, has been cut off from the world for so long. North Korea has no experience with any kind or any degree of democracy. So that how you go to an impoverished, possibly starving North Korean peasant, and say, “right - now, what is your view on how to spend the next year’s budget?” - that does make the eyebrows go up a bit.

Fossedal - Although, in some cases, historically, it isn’t always the times when things are going well and smoothly that states are willing to innovate and reform politically. Sometimes, often, it only happens under duress. If we look at the adoption of direct democracy by the Swiss and then the U.S. states in the 1800s, it was a time when there was vast dissatisfaction with corruption in the U.S., and the aftermath of the 1848 revolution in Switzerland and Europe.

Perhaps the next steps will occur in states where things aren’t going as smoothly as the U.S. and Europe today, where there are urgent demands for change that have to be met. The Zurich newspapers, in the 1860s, said all the things we might say today about the Koreans and their readiness or lack thereof.

Beedham - Well, fair point.

When I mentioned Latin America a bit earlier, one of the things in my mind was that here are peoples who are accustomed to elections and to going out to vote, and in many cases, especially in the last 10 years, the elections have been fairly honest. The trouble is that Latin American politics still has a fairly high proportion of corrupt politicians. That is one of the circumstances which tend to make people say, golly, I think we should do it ourselves; let’s make the jump to direct democracy.

I was thinking that about Latin America, and if that is the case there, indeed, why not in South Korea and parts of East Asia? I think I was hesitating particularly about the North Korean part of the electorate, because that has been cut off from any kind of contact or practice with democracy, or any form of political responsibility, for so long.

Fossedal - The U.S. today - even the U.S., we might say - is very concerned with the issue of money and politics. Not in the sense of direct bribes and petty corruption, but with a much broader and more elusive corruption. The campaigns of Bill Bradley and John McCain weren’t victorious, but I think they tapped into a deep hunger for political reform. I think that if direct democracy is applied in the U.S. or Europe, it’s more likely to come as a way of reforming the system to immunize it from big money, rather than people waking up and saying, “gee, we’re so close to direct democracy, we may as well evolve the last little bit.”

Beedham - I think a couple of things have been happening in recent times, and may be ready to happen much more quickly now, which point in this direction.

One is that, in large chunks of the world, a large proportion of the population of any given country is reasonably well-educated, reads a fair amount, knows about public affairs, and is therefore more likely to say, “why should we have to delegate hundreds of decisions, in between elections, to people who are no better educated than I am and no more intelligent than I am?”

Secondly, precisely when this first kind of skepticism about representative democracy is growing, a second kind of skepticism is also expanding, which is, “golly, we are now able to know and find out much more about what happens in the political world and how our politicians behave, and we’re discovering that quite a number of them are, not corrupt in the sort of African or Latin American sense, but that money is influencing their decisions in various ways which a lot of people find rather distasteful and rather inefficient as well.

So the combination of those two things - the feeling by people that they are competent to handle their affairs, and secondly, the feeling that representative democracy is vulnerable to money pressure - is a very powerful combination. We’ve seen this both in the United States and in several European countries.

Fossedal - Diffusing power would seem like a straightforward way to decrease the role of money; it’s easier to bribe or pressure a few dozen key legislators than 250 million people. But David Broder, one of the better U.S. political reporters, has written a book arguing that direct democracy will be government by monied interests waging demagogic advertising campaigns. It’s a well-written critique, even though I think he leaves out a lot of information and perspective. What do you think of the argument?

Beedham - Well, I think David Broder is basically wrong. Of course it is true that direct democracy, the referendum process, is open to propaganda. And the more money you have, the more propaganda you can make. But I would argue that the power of money to make propaganda can be limited by agreed rules about how much you can raise and spend and in what ways and so on.

Fossedal - There are also natural limits. For example, the Swiss spend very little on their referenda, because as the electorate has evolved over the years, it’s been found that highly emotional appeals and last-minute negatives and so on don’t have much influence. Even in the U.S., which is not as developed as the Swiss system, there are often cycles in which, one year, there are so many ballot measures that people feel overloaded and simply vote them all down - and it then becomes much harder, in the next cycle, to get anyone to give any money.

Beedham - Yes, although it is true that people can be influenced by what they read and what they see on the television screens and on the internet - okay, they’ll be influenced by it, sometimes wrongly maybe, but that’s not quite the same thing as the more direct ability of money to influence politicians. You can’t bribe a whole people. You can try to distort their judgment by your propaganda, but you can’t actually bribe them.

So, direct democracy is in one instance vulnerable but in important ways less vulnerable than representative democracy to the power of money, I would argue. And there are ways of making sure that the arguments are made fairly, dispassionately to all the sides on a particular debate.

The Swiss experience shows this. In a Swiss referendum, every voter receives extensive and dispassionately written materials which set out the different points and the major arguments pro and con. I’ve read several of these now, and this is fair and open and objectively written. And the government has come to think that an important part of its job is to provide the voters with this information about the arguments for and against the resolution, at least most of the major arguments.

Now, after that, if you want to make a television program or a publication or what have you, you can do that. Radio broadcasts, internet sites, or posters in the street - if your argument or your particular set of facts isn’t being covered, you have this further recourse.

Fossedal - I was very impressed by how little the Swiss spend on the referendum votes, considering how affluent the society is. And the bulk of this is from natural forces and from self-restraint - there are some rules for campaign finance, but very few. The spending is low because the electorate gets most of its information from newspapers, and it credits what it sees there more than it does any particular advertisement. The result is a very high degree of self-regulation.

There’s another response or another point to make about Broder’s concern with the role of money. In a direct democracy, such lobbying as there is directed at the people. And lobbying the people means that they’re getting information. Any dollar spent on lobbying is thus a dollar spent on public education, if you will. What you get is what you have in Switzerland - arguably the most sophisticated, and certainly one of the best informed and best read, electorates in the world. It’s as if every Swiss had been a member of parliament for a month or two - which is probably what all the votes accumulate too, if not more, if you were to add up all the votes of a typical Swiss over his or her lifetime.

And there’s something of a cumulative, deliberative effect. One of the things that worried our founding fathers was the passions of the people, and their inability to deliberate questions for enough time to make serious judgments. The experience of direct democracy in Switzerland and many U.S. states has been for some measures to come up many times - from tax measures to immigration and others. Over time, the voters get to see these, vote on them, and get more information through a number of cycles. The result - direct democracy in practice - is something much closer to the deliberations of a legislature than I think Madison or Hamilton ever imagined.

A good example is the series of referenda on immigration that you mentioned. As you noted, these things have been going on for years. In the process, the public is able to deliberate the same question over and over, with much information being thrown at them, and constant refinements made in the arguments and reporting by both sides. At the least, a lot of social tension that might otherwise be bottle up is released, as people feel they are having their say. And, I would argue, what actually takes place is a cumulative, highly pedagogical process. It isn’t just the people who learn either. The elites learn a thing or two from the people.

The net is that direct democracy, under the modern conditions of global communications and the like, functions much more like a classical, deliberative legislature.

Beedham - Very much so, except that the legislature then is no longer an elite, but the people. In Switzerland, as you observe, the people are fairly mature in the exercise of direct democracy. That might be one reason why they are able to have such restraint, on both the spending by special interests and the sort of general volume and tone of propaganda, even without having many formal, legal limits on these.

The people with money have discovered that it’s a waste of effort - there’s no point in throwing a lot of money around the place. They’re mature enough to simply absorb a lot of this and smile, and then go about their business and support what they think is the right.

Now, if that happens in Switzerland, I don’t see why it can’t happen in other countries - countries with an educated, reasonably self-confident population, which means North America, most of Europe, chunks of Latin America coming up, chunks of Asia coming up. A maturing process is necessary in any kind of politics. Representative democracy, in its early days, had some pretty hair-raising aspects. I mean, read Dickens, and the other Victorian English novelists. But that matured, and the process is now reaching the point where direct democracy may be ready to evolve in much of the Euro-American world.

Direct democracy will have its bumps and its ups and downs. But as it matures, and as people get used to it, I think, particularly in the question of money and pressures - as we have seen in Switzerland already - people will, on the whole, turn their backs upon it and behave with great wisdom.

Fossedal - Andreas Gross, the Swiss parliamentarian, has made the case that direct democracy can be useful, and may even be essential, to building the European state. First, it would be governed better, second, it would build social and political bridges across national borders, and third, it would mean Europeans would be committing sovereign acts as Europeans. Of course, it might be that the subject matter on which one could bring referenda or initiative would be highly limited at first, but it would start the process. What do you think of that?

Beedham - I think it’s certainly true that Switzerland could far more easily accept the idea of joining the European Union if there were some elements of direct democracy that were practiced Europe-wide.

On the other hand, as far as the European Union is concerned, this is still a very fragile experiment. The present evidence is that the application of direct democracy could have a very disintegrating effect on the European Union. The most vivid example at the moment is what would happen to the effort to expand the European Union to include states in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. If there were a direct vote on that question by the existing members of the European Union, it would be defeated.

Something like this was actually suggested by a German politician six weeks ago or thereabouts - that there should be a referendum in Germany on the idea of expanding the union. This was promptly sat upon because public opinion polls suggested that most Germans would vote against it. This is now being dropped from the argument.

There would be a similar problem if you ask, what would be the outcome of a direct vote on the question of the Euro - do we want the Euro or not? In Germany, in the opinion polls, more than two-thirds of the population do not want the Euro, and would reject it. The Euro would collapse if it were subjected to the process of direct democracy at the moment.

Now, that is not an argument against doing it - what I’m saying is that it’s extremely unlikely because of the political results people would project from it at this time.

Fossedal - But is that where the debate would wind up after the debate, and if people were listening to the debate under the knowledge that they would be having a direct vote on the subject?

Beedham - I don’t know. You’re quite right that there is this difference between how people answer a poll one day, and how people vote on a referendum after considering it as legislators, as it were.

Fossedal - In the long run, we need to have that debate, to move public opinion, don’t we? In the long run, even in representative democracy, if two-thirds of the people don’t want something, it eventually is going to be defeated.

Beedham - I would certainly accept the application of direct democracy to the processes of the European Union, but my guess is that, at the end of the day, the result, in the short term, would be a European Union defined by much looser, probably much more purely economic terms, than the one which many European politicians want.

This is not an argument against applying direct democracy to the EU in an evolutionary way, but a statement about its immediate prospects. You would be swimming against the politicians’ tide.

Fossedal - We’ve alluded to, but haven’t mentioned yet, a major factor. I’m not sure but that it isn’t close in importance to the end of the Cold War - namely, the internet, and the way it makes information instantaneously available, and the way it makes

Just to give a simple picture, I see people who can point and click and buy an airplane ticket with an aisle seat, even a car with very specific features, eventually asking themselves, why isn’t my government as responsive as that? I don’t mean to confuse the issue with the question of whether the referenda themselves, or other voting, actually take place online - I view that as a rather unimportant technical advance that will happen but is merely a mechanical change.

I’m talking about the experience that they feel on the net, and the way they can make specific, granular decisions, against the defused, clouded, indirect way they are limited to making their vote felt as citizens. “Write a letter to your congressman” just isn’t as satisfying as “you be the congressman.” I just think the contrast between a highly responsive economy, and a comparatively sluggish political system, will be a powerful force.

Beedham - I think you’re absolutely right. When I wrote about direct democracy in the 1993 essay, I mentioned things like the facts and new ways of communicating with each other - but in the ten years since then, things have leapt ahead.

The internet is now a powerful symbol of the development of individual knowledge and of our responsibility, which is certainly going to be about politics as well as about buying a nice car and so on. This is one test of the kind of electorate I was talking about earlier. Most people in most developed countries, and that is a growing number of countries, are now not only reasonably well educated, they know that they can do things. They know that they’ve enjoyed a wide range of choices they can make economically - and yet they’re being told that in politics, in the very place where after all we set the rules for these other exchanges, that in politics, they’re not competent. They’re told that, yes, you can come along and say in very general terms what you want every four or five years, but you can’t be trusted to take decisions in between there. I think this is going to going to start to seem like utter nonsense.

The internet, then, is both a symbol and cause of these changes in society that are going to lead people to demand direct democracy.

Fossedal - You’ve been very generous with your time, I want to thank you.

Beedham - Well, you’re welcome, and so have you, and you’re making the telephone call.

Fossedal - It’s been my pleasure.

Beedham - By the way, I can’t claim to have read the whole of it, but I think your book on Switzerland is admirable. It’s the kind of combination of direct experience - describing the mood and the feeling and so on - with a lot of hard facts, which is just the kind of combination I like.

Fossedal - Well, thank you very much. I was hoping to drag a jacket blurb out of you at some point; that sounds like one right there. It means a lot to me that you find some merit in it. Your essays are one of the things that led me to be very interested in direct democracy and therefore in Switzerland, which has perfected the art - or anyway, has taken it to its furthest extent.

Beedham - I entirely agree. The Swiss are the true example of this. I have a special interest in this because my wife is Swiss; she actually voted yesterday on the four referendums. They defeated, quite correctly in my view, the 18 percent initiative, and they defeated several others as well. (Editor: Swiss voters on September 24 rejected several measures, including a highly publicized proposal to limit the foreign-born share of the population to 18 percent; the Swiss have defeated a number of such anti-immigration proposals going back to the 1970s.)

Fossedal - Well, that gives us something else to agree on, perhaps at another time.

Beedham - Very good.