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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I would suggest looking at CA's referendum system to see how people really aren't good at voting on things with larger implications.

Arguably CA's wonky tax system has some of it's roots in an effort to keep taxes low, and to some extent backfired long term.

For one off items legalizing marijuana or so with limited repercussions on other things, those kind of referendums would seem well suited. But anything else voters I suspect would be happy to vote to eat and have their cake at the same time.

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Yes that is the real problem.

Issues are tied together (if we build a new road there isn't money for a new school or if we build a new road then we have ongoing maintenance outlay and some people's homes get demolished).

I'd argue that you have other countries that have a better functioning direct democracy (Switzerland has lots of initiatives each year)

Isn't the main problem in ça that there are few limitations on how much can be spent to promote and initiative and essentially buy the result?

And this seems to impact the quality of representative democracy too...

While it depends on your perspective, I'll contend the Swiss referendum system has also disadvantaged certain groups of people as well. One example of that was the 2009 minaret referendum:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendum

How's that an example of a bad outcome?

It's an example of using a referendum system to religiously disenfranchise a minority population. Further, much of the imagery used to persuade the population to vote for the referendum, such as the Muslim woman wearing a chador across the backdrop of a Swiss flag covered by minarets that look like missiles, was bigoted and defamatory.

My point in raising this incident is to provide an example that a direct referendum system has advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages seen here is that the system can be used to remove a right from minority population important to their cultural identity. More broadly, there's always a tension between majority rule and protection of minority rights in a democracy and both the California and Swiss referendum systems allow those lines to be redrawn by populist appeal.

If anyone’s curious about the Swiss system, here’s a guide that I believe I found on HN that explains it in great detail:

https://250bpm.com/blog:161/

Also how businesses can write for themselves whatever laws they want in California, if they’re like Uber and Lyft and can spend enough millions on the PR to push it through.

I guess that’s democracy?

Representative democracy tends to deal with those things a bit better. Folks making decision A, B, and C might know something about those things and have to balance them.

County seats make decisions for cities. State makes decisions for counties. For now at least, I think state is independent to an extent from the center.

Example: Alameda county decides if city of Hayward should build more units than the denizens of Hayward itself. This could be an example of regional governance.

Do we need more decentralization and local governance rather than regional governance?

I think that's a different question compared to just direct voting on issues and representative democracy.

Layers of government do have their uses. The local counties in my area make larger transit decisions together via another organization, it's something that would be hard to make if the cities had to get together to make each deal.

> I guess that’s democracy?

"Democracy" isn't a magical word which renders everything problem-free and perfect.

Direct-democracy is a concept which is plagued with a multitude of problems, both technical and practical and ideological, which are not possible to rule out.

Lack of accountability, decision-making in ignorance, and tragedy of the commons, for instance.

If we want to live in a free and open and inclusive society where rule of law prevails then we can't simply throw the "democracy" tag around and call it a done deal.

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