One should be able to expect that a board of an association that is committed to a cause should have at least a few people on it who have formal training in that cause and appropriate professional experience.
Otherwise, you could ask yourself with good reason why they can't find any experts to officially represent their cause.
Those folks can hire experts to interpret white papers if needed, but they aren't participating in science, they are consuming it.
(I don't need to be an excellent musician to advocate for the belief that Spotify doesn't equitably pay musicians. If I wanted to legislatively address that, I'd need lawyers and politicians, not musicians. And I could build a data driven case without many musicians at all.)
If you wanted to be taken seriously about “equitable pay for musicians”, then you’d absolutely need people who understand the economics and market dynamics of the music industry. Only having legal expertise makes it seem like you’re merely lobbying your personal feelings — not about a real problem.
> And I could build a data driven case without many musicians at all.
But not without data scientists, economists, and probably music industry insiders to provide data. And that’s not a job for lawyers and lobbyists; which was the original question.
If a cop is busting heads, you don't wait to elect a new sheriff, you bring a lawsuit to fix the acute problem. If a department is systematically harming a group, you can try to elect someone who will make this their project, or you can get an intervention to prevent further harm via the legal system.
Using the legal system to prevent acute harm is both correct and reasonable, even in a democracy.
Democracy is about the majority; and in Switzerland - in contrast to most other democracies - it's the majority of the real population, not just an elite class, and the people directly decide about real problems, not just who should represent them. And there are even provisions which assure that local concerns are sufficiently considered. You should inform yourself about this great political system.
> Using the legal system to prevent acute harm is both correct and reasonable
In the present case, it's clearly a misuse; it's a lobby organization with a lot of money that pro forma puts forward an association of old women so that with this sleight of hand the complaint is accepted by the court at all on a subject where the court has no jurisdiction at all. The aim is to undermine a democratically made decision against the will of the people, i.e. exactly the opposite of a democratic process.
It is in the nature of human beings that a few will always be dissatisfied, no matter how well off they are or what form of society is applied.
The sovereignty of the Swiss people is a compromise that came about on a voluntary basis through the coming together of people from different regions and languages. No one is forced to live in Switzerland, and yet a considerable part of the world seems to want to do so.
You might say, will they did eventually and recently fix that, but what systemic inequalities allowed that to last so long?
For what it's worth, I do think direct democracy is good, but I don't think direct democracy always solves the most urgent problems or ensures that nonmajority people can survive.
Let me be extra clear, Swiss voting system sounds pretty good. But it's not flawless. It can even be the best system in widespread use and not be flawless. The will of the majority can be wrong, and it needs to be acceptable to challenge it.
Here in the USA the will of the majority was to segregate schools and prevent Black kids from attending them. That's what the majority wanted. It was wrong, and the minority using the courts to overturn the will of the majority is correct. Waiting to convince a new generation to integrate would do irreparable harm.
Challenges to the majority viewpoint are crucial and healthy and normal in a democracy. Whether that majority is conservative or progressive, we need to test the results regularly.
The values and legal system of a democracy essentially reflect the will of the people, and fifty years ago people had a different attitude to these values than they do today. And we cannot expect each country to come to the same conclusions. The question is: do we know a better system than (direct) democracy to improve society in the long term? Likely not.
An ever-growing danger that is damaging society and democracy is the ever-increasing polarization and thus the reduction of pluralism of opinion and discussion culture, fuelled, for example, by lobby organizations that have very large financial resources at their disposal, or by the corruption of science through tendentious funding systems such as we have today. It is becoming increasingly difficult to form a sufficiently objective opinion on factual issues and to isolate the relevant facts from the many fake news and paid bogus experts. In Germany in the 1930s, for example, we saw how systematic misinformation and indoctrination can affect the will of voters. In relation to the present discussion, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39995558.
women were not "people"? Were they asked? If not, why not?
I have questions. What is a "real" population?
The swiss direct democracy is about "the majority of the real population" ? So the intiatives are won with a majority of the population? >50% of the population? Is that true? I thought it's something like >50% of the valid votes.
> You should inform yourself about this great political system.
Please explain this great political system to me.
Might be the wrong term, thus in quotes; I wanted to express, that the voters can directly influence political decisions; in a representative democracy, in contrast, such decisions are reserved for a political elite (in the case of a representative democracy e.g. a parlament); the problem of the latter is, that this "elite" tends to live in their own world during their term of office.
> Please explain this great political system to me.
That would really go too far in a commentary, and there are also established sources that can explain this far better than I can. I'm also not used to writing about it in English. I recommend first of all the links mentioned in my other comments.
and the "elite" can influence voters through other means. That "masses" can be manipulated should be known.
Would I buy stock in a company that uses biochemistry products, but did not have a biochemist? Yes, of course.
And they obviously didn't convince Swiss voters, but made them angry instead and more sceptical towards European institutions.
See e.g. https://www.20min.ch/story/schweiz-verurteilt-klimaseniorinn... which includes a poll where 80% of currently ~15k people regard Swiss climate measures as sufficient and the interference of foreign judges as an impertinence.