Hmmm.
QUOTE
But perhaps also we're overestimating the capacity for people to vote on actual issues.
If you take that view, then the notion of democracy is out the window. That is not to say you are not right, you may be. I don't think you are. As I said at the outset, people are the best judges of their own interest, even if they are not very good at it.
It is perfectly true that influence is a problem. I suggest that it works best on those issues where people do not have a direct interest, and I think you agreed with that in an earlier post. I honestly think that a PR campaign is not irresistible, even if it does last a year. But more than that I think a great deal of the effectiveness of that kind of influence rests on the overload of information and the ephemeral nature of news. I think we can counter that. A referendum is one way of doing that: because it is a concrete event with an outcome on a particular day. It is hard to use the media in the familiar way in that case: because much of how it works is by familiarisation, I think. That is, they raise a proposition which is unacceptable and there is a big hoo hah and they drop it for while. They then raise it again,and now you have heard it before so it is not quite so shocking: and of course it is not quite the same because they have noted which bits were really sticking points. This process is repeated and it becomes a test of patience rather than a substantive debate. And all the time the familiarity undermines the opposition. That is a process I seem to see on many issues and it is not dissimilar to advertising. We cannot have a perfect system but a referendum which is truly binding in its outcome should be a time limited campaign and people should be more engaged because their vote will matter.
You are correct that it is difficult to define the conditions when a referendum must be held. A couple of notions occur to me:
1. The petition process which you already have in your country. You have advised that this is ineffective and you have explained why. Do you think it would make a difference if the petition could generate a referendum if a given threshold was met? As I understand what you said it does not do that at present and so there is little power attached to it and it is more of a diversionary tactic; what we call in this country "kicking it into the long grass" (we do that not by petition, but by setting up a parliamentary commission: comes to much the same outcome, so far as I can see). A petition which leads to a referendum may be how it is done in Scandinavia: I do not know.
2. A veto. There are two possible mechanisms for this. In the first any citizen could literally veto any proposed measure on a claim that it violates one of the safeguarding principles set out in my OP. So if the bill can be shown to undermine the equal worth principle, or the supremacy of the democratic body, for example, the process of passing it into law would be automatically halted. This is somewhat in line with taking out an injunction to prevent someone from doing something and it would necessarily involve the courts. In America such a process ought to be available because ultimtely some things are ruled to be unconstitutional: but it takes years. I am suggesting that this should be almost instant and should be always granted if a prima facie case is made. There would then need to be a second level of process to resolve the limits of the veto and to determine if it should be lifted.
It is true that such a process could be very disruptive, in that there would be vexatious claims. It will be argued that government would come to a halt. But very few things need instant action, and under the lowest level of decision making principle a great many of them would be confined to local matters: not to national decisions. In any case slow and well constructed law is preferable to reactive legislation in most instances: even wars don't usually come with no warning. So I am not convinced the theoretical dangers will actually materialise. Particularly if there is a period of abeyance between such vetos such that once the process had been concluded the matter cannot be raised again by either side for some longish period.
Would it lead to more litigation and greater power for the courts? Yes. I am not uncomfortable with that, though.
The other mechanism would allow the veto only on some threshold of support demonstrated and again your country's existing petition structure might serve.
In both of these instances one of the outcomes would be that the people would have a direct responsibility to protect each other and their fundamental values; and a means of doing so. To me that is a very positive thing because it is obvious that leaving our protection in the hands of others is not working too well
