I live in Switzerland. Direct democracy works perfectly well. I don't understand why it is not the default mode and no other country uses it -- to me, it is the obvious way of running things.
The standard, surprisingly popular, rhetoric I hear against direct democracy in other European countries is really very unconvincing to me: people are too stupid to vote, people can't know enough about specific subjects to vote well, people aren't interested in politics (duh, why would you in a system where you can't influence politics), people can be influenced too easily through propaganda and other nonsense arguments which would all apply to a representative democracy as well.
People don't like change I guess and they (want to) love their country the way it is. On top of that I get a feeling that people somehow look up to politicians subconsciously as somehow being above them or at least being above their neighbors. They seem to equate leadership and sales skills to being able to take hard decisions and being incorruptible / divine. It's like the "king effect" (just made this up): everybody hates the king's decisions, but at the same time the king is the hero and pride of the nation and who could possibly want any other king?
In any case, this form of direct democracy wouldn’t solve the problems the parent is talking about. To achieve that, you’d need to vote on every decisions made by every public official ever.
Every Swiss citizen can propose a law to be voted on one of the next referendums, provided that they will collect the appropriate minimum number of signatures in its support.
However, you missed the part of my comment where I wasn’t talking about Switzerland at all, I was talking in generalities about the places where it was being discussed as an idea to implement.
Take LA for example. A lot of people who post here seem to have strong opinions on how that city is run, and I’d bet a lot of them even live there. If the LA city council elections generate turnout in the mid-teens, that is considered very high. Turnout below 10% is not strange.
Switzerland’s voter turnout is actually quite pedestrian. It’s higher than a lot of local elections in the US for sure, and perhaps even high enough to prevent the kind of special interest local government policies you see all over the US. But just because something seems to mostly work in one single, small, rich European country, doesn’t mean it will work as well anywhere else.
That’s an interesting thesis, but it’s not at all substantiated. Switzerland may have a better voter turnout than LA city council elections, but it has some of the worst turnout in the OECD[0]. If I was going to take a complete guess at the reason (as you did), I’d say it’s a cultural thing more than anything else (outside the influence of compulsory voting laws).
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/21/u-s-voter-t...
I can't say it's worse than other systems, but it's also far from obvious to me that it's better.
To have such a large society being run that way would have lots of unintended consequences. Imagine a country where voters are so burnt out on voting for every policy that the response rate becomes extremely low - and the only people who vote on any given policy are the slim minority with vested interests.
They mitigate the "low response" phenomenon by encouraging political awareness from a young age and trust in public institutions. It's imperfect and it may be a massive task to make such cultural changes in the US, but I don't think there's anything inherently stopping it from scaling.
Likewise California's rural areas can get very conservative. There just happen to be a lot more voters living in the cities.