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Comment by ronaldx | Hacker News Reader

Agreed: as a British citizen, I find this vote incredibly close.

As an analogy, there is absolutely no political will here to change the status quo regarding unchecked data collection. The two largest political parties would likely be automatically against an equivalent amendment on national security grounds, whipping their members to vote against (and few members would care to break ranks).

As such, no vote would even take place. If it was forced in a full chamber, it would perhaps fall 100-550.

Edited to add: Exemplified by a spending review announced a month ago http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-23060592 "3.4% increase in combined budget for intelligence agencies": meanwhile many other budgets are squeezed by 5-10%

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As a Swiss I'm always amazed how in indirect democracies, 'political will' equates to whatever the top ruling people are up to, depending largely on what lobbyist de jour is paying best as well as the proximity of elections. It's absurd to me to be honest. Why wouldn't you want a system where (a) the final say can always be cast by people's votes and (b) the government is put together proportionally? This basically mitigates both of these problems: (1) Elections become way less important, so the parties don't throw too much money into them - winning 2% every 4 years, in rare cases an additional cabinet member of 7, just doesn't justify putting hundreds of millions into a campaign. (2) Lobbying is worth much less as well since you can't lobby people very easily.

And yes, I'm aware that every system has flaws and people's votes aren't always sane - but given the alternatives...

I am extremely interested in direct democracy, and the possibility of using it for larger populations thanks to technology improvements. To my knowledge the main argument against direct democracy has been "it only works for small groups". Could modern computing and telecommunications change that?

First of all, yes, that's always the argument I hear. That and people not taking Switzerland seriously since it's anyway just Nazi gold and gangster banks enabling us to do what we do, right?

Online voting tools could definitely change the cost as well as the legitimacy of running a superpower scale direct democracy. In Switzerland we largely handle it through voting by letter and every commune handles the counting - technically it's certainly possible to have fraud at that point, however at least I'm not aware of any case where a people's vote would have been faked that way.

Anyway, for larger scale voting I'd have a look at this TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_bismark_e_voting_without_frau.... E-voting combined with tokens on paper seems to be the winner for me.

But don't forget, the stability of the Swiss system doesn't only come from its direct democratic nature, I'd say the principle of proportionality applied to the government, as I mentioned above, is at least as important. In Switzerland this ensures both checks and balances as well as a government that represents the current political views of the parliament. Also, it lead to a multi-party system with 5 larger players and dynamic coalitions depending on the actual issue. Together with the constant fear of the people's vote this handles most issues quite neatly - even if the process tends to be a bit slower, the output of 'bullshit' is much lower than the things I read from abroad if you will.

The main argument against direct democracy is the danger of majoritarian oppression: e.g. imagine calling a vote to reinstate slavery and succeeding because 51% of the population supports slavery. Having a set of laws like the Bill of Rights that is agreed upon by consensus and enforced by courts is a safeguard against that.

There's nothing in direct democracy inconsistent with a constitution securing basic rights and a supreme court enforcing it. Indeed, Switzerland has exactly that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Federal_Constitution

The main argument against, as I see it, is the lack of accountability, the prime example being California demanding more spending and lower taxes at the same time. Of course, indirect democracy has done very little to prevent that either.

When Switzerland doesn't pass laws similar to California's, I think it's because they have a much more homogenous society where there is simply a large degree of agreement on how things should be done - and so, the remaining bits lend themselves well to be decided by direct democracy.

That's also my response to the GP: no, no amount of interwebs and technology can turn a large and diverse population that disagrees fundamentally on many important issues into a small and homogenous one that agrees on most things.

The Swiss aren't homogeneous, though. They have four official languages and 20% of the country are resident foreigners. The various cantons don't often agree with each other and only 30-40% of the country votes.

Thank you. Here it is again, the 'US isn't homogeneous' excuse.

It's not like representative democracy stops this... See 1865-1965.

How likely is it that a majority of a modern society would agree to something crazy like this, vs. just the ruling party of an indirect democracy? Unfortunately we don't have much statistical evidence, since there's basically only Switzerland having such a system nationwide, but at least we know that in the history of this republic since 1848 there hasn't been such an incident, while the Weimarer Republic, culturally close to a majority of Swiss and under an indirect democratic rule, managed to elect a ruling party that went haywire.

Although I would criticise my own system just as heavily as you do, the Swiss system is not exactly idyllic either: right-wing propaganda led the Swiss people into banning minarets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret_controversy_in_Switzer...

As I mentioned - people's votes aren't always sane. That being said the Minaret thing was a non sensical outcome, yes, but it doesn't really change that much. Mosks are still allowed and the Muslim community didn't seem to bother too much. I'm convinced that if the initiative were to forbid mosks or any essential part of Muslim religion, the result would have been completely different.

Looking at recent referendum topics, it seems to me that the right-wing Swiss People's Party have a lot of power and skill in choosing referenda that appeal to a mob majority against vulnerable minorities.

e.g. the June 2013 referendum also has an astounding result, on Asylum law changes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendum%2C_2013#Asylu...

I'm really conflicted about indirect vs direct democracies.

On one hand, indirect democracies allow the ruling few to impose their will rather than the will of the people. On the other hand, many people are ignorant of the facts and could be persuaded to vote poorly (eg against the best interests of the majority) in a direct democracy.

Then the people will have to live with and hopefully learn from the consequences of their decisions.

3.4% increase in combined budget for intelligence agencies

Yes, that was a rather striking discrepancy. Our media seem to be giving the current administration a free ride lately regarding civil liberties generally and trying to control the Internet in particular. Maybe everyone is too busy worrying about getting onto the "Bob watches porn" list this week to worry about getting onto any other lists that may or may not be relevant to this discussion as well.

Whipping in the United States Congress is far less effective than in Parliament. There is no equivalent to the three line whip and the party leadership can't expel members. The most they can do to rebellious members is take away their preferred committee assignments, and even there they are hemmed in by tradition.

However, particularly for Republicans at the present time, there is always a looming threat of a primary challenge if ideological purity is not maintained.

They can't expel members, but they can certainly kick them out of caucus. That's effectively the same immediate power parties have in a parliament: when someone is removed from caucus they sit as an independent.

The biggest direct difference is that in many parliamentary systems the party has control over who will run under their banner in the next election. In the US, the only power they have is indirect via fundraising.

Really the difference is one of expectation: in the parliamentary system party discipline is just a ground rule that's understood by everybody. If your MP votes for something you don't like they can say "Yeah I didn't like that bill either and I brought up my concerns during our caucus meeting. Ultimately the party decided to support it though" and you don't really think less of them.

That expectation cuts the other way too. If a US Representative got kicked out of caucus over a controversial vote it would be considered shockingly petty. It'd be the major political story for weeks and would tarnish the whole party. In parliament that's just what happens and nobody would expect any different. A semi-recent Canadian that comes to mind: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/story/2007/06/05/b...

As you mention, they can (and do) withhold committee assignments. Usually this is done more on the sly though rather than as an obvious retaliation. Members that have a reputation for toeing the party line get the nice assignments, the pork project for their district, etc. The "guy none of us can stand but keeps getting elected without our help" just gets to posture for the cameras.

It is very close, especially when you consider that a million more Americans voted for a Democrat House candidate than a Republican one.

Republicans have a 33 seat majority, despite losing the popular vote 48.7% - 47.6%, thanks to rampant gerrymandering after the 2010 election.

I did a (meaningless) back of the envelope calculation, and found that if the number of representatives were proportional to the popular vote count, and the same percentage of Democrats voted for this bill, then the bill would have passed.

Of course, it probably wouldn't have made it through the senate, since the non-talking filibuster allows any single member to effectively veto any bill brought up.

As far as I can tell, this issue crosses party lines. Republicans voted 94-134 against the amendment, and Democrats voted 111-83 for it. A fairly even spread, compared to any number of more partisan issues.

http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/155815805

It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with gerrymandering (though it likely does to some extent). A more likely cause is that cities tend to have a democrat win by a wide margin and rural areas tend to have a republican win by a smaller margin. Combine that with the fact that all districts aren't identical in size and you get a legitimate way for this to happen.

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