Gregory A. Fossedal, Direct Democracy in Switzerland, 2002.Part 5
L'Idee Suisse20
The End of History and the Next Citizen
"The people can never willfully betray their own interests; but they may possibly be betrayed by the representatives of the people." -- The Federalist, No. 63There is little point in studying Swiss democracy unless there is something distinctive about it -- and not only distinctive, but importantly distinctive. If this is a bad assumption, then Switzerland is worth thinking about only for the specialist. The historian interested in quaintness, in a land of cheese and chocolates, will find it diverting but not terribly urgent. The economist who would like to emulate the country's material economic success may find a survey of its institutions of use. What is more, as an age of global communications and national integration sets in, we might expect even these points of distinction to gradually decline, not sharpen, in significance.
In that case, to paraphrase author Francis Fukiyama, then not only is the world-historical evolution over, but it ends in Sweden or Chile. A few economic variables may alter, but the political structure and the guiding spirit of the system are identical and unchanged. Either in the "nanny state" feared by Alexis de Tocuqeville or the new libertarian world announced in the pompous commercials of the high-tech Internet and cellular communications companies, it is the end of history.
There is, of course, a very different possibility. It may be that Swiss democracy, while resembling European and American democracy in many features, and most of its superficial ones, is so divergent in a few vital particulars that it offers a meaningful alternative to the parliamentary democracies of Europe and much of Asia, and the presidential democracies of the United States and most of the Americas.
Certainly it tends in a different direction. This is made clear if one merely mentions the possibility of greater use of direct democracy in the United States or Europe. Immediately, from most elites anyway, one encounters a mildly hostile reaction. Interestingly, though, the reasons raised against direct democracy nearly all could be used, and in earlier times were used, to argue against the American Revolution; to argue it could not be extended elsewhere; to deny the vote to blacks, women, and other groups deemed insufficiently educated, or otherwise "not ready" as a cultural or traditional matter for democracy.
If so, it is indeed an irony that just at the moment that nearly all proclaim the historical triumph of democracy, it becomes clear that we may not even know what we mean when we say, "democracy has triumphed."1 And it may make a difference to know which type of democracy has won. First, it may matter because the types of democracy may have important differences. Second, it may even affect the survivability of "democracy" to know which version of it will cover the globe in fifty or one-hundred years. Will it be the highly populist, accessible, citizen's democracy of the Swiss; the relatively elitist, difficult-to-access system of Britain, Japan, or Germany; or some amalgam or mix, such as the American system? The latter, by both design and accident, stands somewhat in between -- closer, perhaps, in assumption and present location to the European elitist democracies, but on a gradual path of movement toward a more Swiss version over much of its history.
Is there an important difference between Swiss democracy and the others? If we consider the discussion of democracy among Western and developing-country elites, we certainly would come to this conclusion.
Among U.S. and European elites, for example, there is little interest in political reforms that would increase popular leverage over government. While many reforms are under discussion, they tend to be elitist in nature. Some favor term limits, some favor spending limits, some favor greater power to local and state governments or to private economic interests -- but none places much emphasis on increasing popular access and elite accountability to the whole people. Instead, the stress is on different arrangements of power within the existing array of elite institutions. This is not to say none of those reforms would be beneficial, and surely some of them would be bad -- but as a matter of fact, none of them even focuses much on popular leverage. As Tocqueville noted, many "democratic" episodes and reform periods are merely "weapons" used to defend the old regime.
When a group of elites does discuss the Swiss system of initiative and referendum, it is generally with nervous contempt -- such a system would not be desirable other than under the highly specific conditions of Switzerland, and certainly, the people in the country under discussion "may not be ready for it yet." This applies even to the leadership class of such highly developed countries as the United States and Europe. Their proposals are always couched in terms of "the people," as are most appeals in a democracy, representative or direct. But any direct means of empowering the people to run the government is considered unimportant, even contemptible. The only type of popular empowerment that holds much interest is that which is achieved indirectly, by placing greater control on some other elite group. Thus a system already choking with indirection and elite maneuverings is to be reformed through indirection and maneuvering.
The thing one seldom hears Western leaders of either the right or left say, however, is that establishing a more populist or citizen's democracy would not matter. For all the proclamations that the Internet, the fax machine, or some other gizmo will change the nature of democracy, few of the evangelists ever suggest using these new devices to permit greater voter input directly on policy. When they do, there is a hopeful silence, and a preference to talk about other things.
This becomes all the more striking if we consider the popular frustration with democracy common in many of the democracies today -- just as democracy seemingly is at its historical and material zenith. In the United States, Britain, and Germany, public opinion surveys show widespread dissatisfaction with the political system. In recent U.S. elections, for instance, leading members of both parties have attacked the system as corrupted by money -- William Clinton in his 1992 campaign against the "greed" of the Reagan-Bush years, the Republicans in their efforts to impeach Clinton over various sexual and financial scandals, and such recent presidential candidates as John McCain and Bill Bradley in their efforts to place limits on "soft money" donations.
The votes McCain and Bradley received are dismissed by some because these challengers were not able to secure their party's nomination. But the strength of their campaigns, particularly the previously little-known Senator McCain, speaks to the powerful urge for change felt by many Americans.
In focus groups and surveys, people express a rage at the system's immobility, feelings that democracy (in America and Europe) is unresponsive to their concerns and frustrations. These findings are highly important to a discussion of representative democracy as against direct forms. They suggest an impatience with the filtering devices and indirection meant, in some sense deliberately, to temper popular opinion. Elite opinion shares some of this analysis, though leading press, business, and political figures are naturally more sanguine about a system that they have the money or clout to access. In February of 2000, The Wall Street Journal even ran an article extolling pork-barrel politics as a key part of the democratic system- -- confusing that which is necessary evil with that which is good, of course, but in a revealing way that pushes the logic of representative democracy to its logical conclusion.
In a prescient article in The Economist at the dawn of the new democratic discussion, Brian Beedham predicted this rise of, and rage at, the lobbyist -- at least for the representative or indirect democracies. With the end of the Cold War, he wrote (1993):
The old central question that is asked at election-time -- which of these two noncompatible systems of politics and economics do you prefer, and how does your preference bear upon the decisions that must now be taken? -- has disappeared. What is left of the agenda of politics is, by comparison, pretty humdrum. It deals for the most part with relatively minor differences of opinion over economic management, relatively small altercations over the amount and direction of public spending, and so on.... The new politics is full of dull detail.It is therefore ideal ground for that freebooter of the modem political world -- the lobbyist. The two most dramatic things that have happened to the developed world since the end of the second world war -- its huge increase in wealth, and its explosion of information technology -- have had as big an effect on politics as they have had on everything else. The lobbyists, the people who want to influence governments and parliaments on behalf of special interests, now command more money than they ever did before. They also have at their disposal a new armoury of persuasion in the computer, the fax machine, and the rest of it.
In the new agenda of politics, where so much depends upon decisions of detail, the power of the lobbyist can produce striking results. It will at times be, literally, corrupting. But even when it is not as bad as that it will make representative democracy seem increasingly inadequate. The voter, already irritated at having so little control over his representatives between elections, will be even angrier when he discovers how much influence the special-interest propagandists are now able to wield over those representatives. An interloper, it will seem, has inserted himself into the democratic process. The result is not hard to guess. The voter is liable to conclude that direct democracy, in which decisions are taken by the whole people, is better than representative democracy, because the many are harder to diddle -- to bribe -- than the few.2
This is not to suggest that there is no such thing as the lobbyist, the demagogue, or the corrupt politician in Switzerland. They do appear, however, to be somewhat less of a factor, and when they are, their presence, surrounded as they are by a system of greater popular access and more popular checks, gives less offense. Most important, the shape of lobbying and electioneering takes a different tone and shape, and it focuses on different objects, than in representative democracy.
In Switzerland, by contrast, people asked an open-ended question about what makes them proud about their country were more likely to give an answer having to do with their political system than were the next several answers combined.3 This is a rough reversal of the increasingly cynical view of politics today -- and even the system -- in the United States and Europe.
Comparing the salient features of the Swiss system to that of other, more indirect democracies, we see some clear differences. Indeed, Swiss democracy appears to be more different from any other democracy, than all the others differ among themselves. The distinction may be even more sharp than when Tocqueville observed the Swiss system in the 1830s and 1840s, or Bryce in the early 1920s.
If democracies were a lot of used automobiles, we would not find the Swiss model differing only in having a different color from most, or a somewhat distinctive tail-fin or external appearance. The very means of locomotion and direction -- the engine and the steering apparatus, and one might even say, the animating spirit -- are different.
This difference is masked by the fact that all democracies have voting, judges, some form of representation, and some degree of popular access, of course. Even so, the differences are quite stark, as becomes clear if we consider the process by which certain critical and certain typical decisions are made by the different democratic types -- and whether such decisions can be made by the people, must be made by the people, or cannot be made by the people at all except through some intermediating elite.
These differences are reviewed in Table 20.1. There are, perforce, generalizations made, but in its broad strokes, the figure presents an accurate review of some of the key distinctions.
"Who commits acts of sovereignty," as Tocqueville noted in analyzing the Swiss political scene in a report to the French parliament, "is sovereign." Tocqueville based his report on two visits to Switzerland, the first in 1836, the second in 1847 and early 1848 -- just before the unexpectedly rapid conclusion of a federal constitution whose basic provisions have now governed the Swiss for more than 150 years.
Tocqueville was nervous about the prospects for Swiss democracy, or for a nation of Switzerland, because the national government made so few acts of sovereignty. As we have observed earlier, Switzerland had federalism, at this point in time, in great measure, but little in the way of a unifying central government. Tocqueville worried, as did many Swiss, that absent some such strong central government -- which the Swiss feared -- the confederation could not hold together.
Tocqueville's principle, however, applies not only to different divisions of government or different elite bodies but to the division of sovereign acts between the people and their representatives -- between direct and indirect democracy. Indeed, had he lived much longer, Tocqueville would have seen both the formation of a more coherent Swiss government, and the extension of a principle that was to give the central government greater sphere for "acts of sovereignty" -- national referendum and initiative. In effect, for this highly decentralized country, initiative and referendum may have been a key legitimizing device which made action by the central and even to some extent the cantonal governments a palatable thing -- as any future encroachments could be checked by the people.
Applying Tocqueville's observation to this realm of popular versus elite action, of government by citizens versus government of citizens, we see that the people of Switzerland are sovereign in a way the people of France, Japan, Russia, Germany, and the United States are not. This is not to say that the ultimate answerability of elected officials to the people, in periodic elections over many issues, is not important. Nor does it mean that the people of Switzerland exercise pure democratic rule: They don't, and instead rely on a number of representative institutions to make certain decisions and carry on certain acts. But these are not the only considerations. Surely to understand a governmental system one must ask such questions as, "Who actually has the final yes or no? Who sets the initial choices that are on the agenda? Who does these things directly, by an act of their own will? And who, while they may influence the sovereign, must act indirectly, by influencing his or her superior?" It is in the way we answer these sorts of questions that Swiss democracy seems importantly different from its Western counterparts.
These distinctions become even clearer when we consider the one awful and difficult question, "Where is the bottom line? Who ultimately acts as sovereign?" This is, perforce, not a question that can be answered by recourse to mathematical formulae. Political power is often used without being visible -- as when a threatened veto of a bill by the president makes it unnecessary for him to issue a veto at all; or when an idea is known to be so popular that it must be passed even if there is no direct consultation of the people on the question; or when a congressional committee kills a bill not by voting it down, but by deciding not to have a vote. Beyond the elusiveness of political acts, we have the general correspondence in form between so much of Swiss democracy and the other democracies. All vote, all have some manner of representation. All have a division of power between three or four branches of government, and all have some distinction between executive, legislative, judicial branches, as well as some sort of civil service that is not subject to change by election.
Even so, one can make the case that the fundamental, animating spirit of Swiss direct democracy is the people, the citizen -- in a way that U.S. democracy, and more so European democracy, do not experience. Table 20.2 compares the character of popular consultation in direct democracy (Switzerland) with that in representative democracies (a composite sketch of the United States and major European democracies plus Japan). While one might cavil about the particulars, there is little avoiding the conclusion that Swiss democracy places greater trust in popular rule, and the other democracies, substantially less so.
The consultation with the public is more frequent in Switzerland. It is much broader as to its scope, particularly in covering policy decisions. Yet on any given item, it is likely to admit of a much more particular intervention by the people. In the communes and some of the cantons, citizens may literally vote on whether to allow a new bridge, hire this schoolteacher, outlaw (or allow) gay marriages -- and so on.
When an American or European votes, he more or less accepts a train of a hundred or a thousand votes that her or his representative promises to cast -- and that assumes that the promise is kept, and covers only the issues that can be known, and forced to discussion, in the election. When the Swiss votes, he accepts a large degree of judgment from his representative -- but he also knows that many of that representative's decisions will be referred back to him for deliberation. And that his word, unlike that given to a pollster or congressional surveyor, has the potential to become the solemn law of the country.
The Swiss citizen even knows that if his representatives and the other representatives are ignoring a particular issue that is highly important to him -- campaign finance reform, education vouchers, guaranteed health insurance, and others -- he can force a national vote on the issue by collecting 100,000 signatures for a national initiative.
From the nature of how the citizen is dealt with flows the very different orientation of the two systems.
In direct or populist democracy, most persuasion is directed at the people, and such persuasion is an end in itself -- it goes to the bottom line sovereign of the regime. In indirect or representative democracy there is more of an emphasis on reaching elites by arguing that the people want this or that -- and when there is an effort at popular persuasion, which to be sure is common, the people are an ends, not a means; they are the way you put pressure on the Congress or the president or the bureaucracy to act.4 The maxim of indirect or representative democracy is, "Write your congressman." The maxim of direct or populist democracy is, "vote yes (or no)."
The tool with which a citizen makes his voice felt in a representative democracy are the sledge-hammer and the megaphone. Lacking the means to commit acts of sovereignty himself or herself, the U.S. or European voter needs implements that can get others who have the power to act to do so. The tools of direct democracy are more in character with a scalpel -- certainly not a perfectly sharp one, nor held by a perfect surgeon, in Switzerland. But it is possible for the citizen to cut right into government and remove this, or adjust that, organ.
Representative democracy is a noisy affair, because so much of the game involves even getting the attention of some elite, or forcing that elite to take action. It is a game in which other elites (big business, lobbyists, the press) seem to wield the only clout. Direct democracy is more quiet, and more characterized by appeals to reason. Anyone who doubts this need only witness a Swiss parliamentary or federal council election, read the campaign materials and press coverage of various referenda, or even simply compare the amounts spent on campaigns and public affairs persuasion and what it is spent on.5
In representative democracy, there is a greater temptation to blame the government, big business, foreigners, the media, or some other group for our problems. Swiss direct democracy has some of that temptation, but it is less -- because the ultimate authority of the people is less ambiguous than in indirect systems. And with authority comes responsibility.
In representative democracy, there are constant appeals for the citizen to "pitch in" -- in Switzerland, citizens appeal to themselves to pitch in, because citizens by and large run the local and cantonal and even federal government.
It is difficult to improve on Beedham's analysis, which has the added value of having been an early report on the new democratic debate:
In much of the world, democracy is still stuck at a half-way house, as it were, in which the final word is delegated to the chosen few.... It has long been pointed out that to hold an election every few years is not only a highly imprecise way of expressing the voter's wishes (because on these rare election days he has to consider a large number of issues, and his chosen "representative" will in fact not represent him on several of them) but is also notably loose-waisted (because the voter has little control over his representative between elections) The end of the battle between communism and pluralism will make representative democracy look more unsatisfactory than ever....Deciding things by vote of the whole people is not, to be sure, a flawless process. The voter in a referendum will find some of the questions put to him dismayingly abstruse (but then so do many members of parliament). He will be rather bored by a lot of the issues of postideological politics (but then he can leave them for parliament to deal with, if he is not interested enough to call for a referendum). He will be subjected, via television, to a propaganda barrage from the rich, high- tech special-interest lobbies (but he is in one way less vulnerable to the lobbyists' pressure than members of parliament are, because lobbyists cannot bribe the whole adult population).
On the other hand, direct democracy has two great advantages.
First, it leaves no ambiguity about the answer to the question: What did the people want? The decisions of parliament are ambiguous because nobody can be sure, on any given issue, whether a parliamentary majority really does represent the wishes of a majority of the people. When the whole people does the deciding, the answer is there for all to see.
Second, direct democracy sharpens the ordinary sense of political responsibility. When one has to make up his own mind on a wide variety of specific issues -- the Swiss tackled 66 federal questions by general vote in the 1980s, hundreds of cantonal ones and an unknown number (nobody added them up) of local-community matters -- he learns to take politics seriously.
Since the voter is the foundation-stone of any sort of democracy, representative or direct, anything that raises his level of political efficiency is profoundly to be desired.
Other factors in the new age make the case for democracy -- and therefore, for direct democracy, its more pure application -- even stronger, Beedham notes. One that he does not detail is the rise of the Internet and many other improvements in telecommunications. Of course, the same observations might have been made about the rise of printed books in the fifteenth century, newspapers and journals in the eighteenth century, telegraphs in the nineteenth century, and radio and television in the twentieth. At the least, however, the growth of global telecommunications further strengthens the case that voters are equipped to take on more and more tasks. Of course, in representative democracy, the ruling class retains more means of obscuring issues, delaying votes, and producing ambiguous results than does direct democracy. That is why the hosannahs proclaimed by some are so shallow -- because without systemic change, these increases in communications technology may ultimately be frustrated. There were telephones, TV sets, and fax machines in Russia too, as there are personal computers in Communist China today. The important change came when Russia's leaders allowed the system to become more tolerant of and responsive to the potential of these tools.
So too, as Beedham does note, the backgrounds of voters around the world -- educational, economic, and other -- are becoming more amenable to an extension of democracy. "A hundred years ago fewer than 2 percent of Americans aged between 18 and 24 went to university; now more than a quarter do. The share of the British population that stayed in education beyond the age of 15 rose sevenfold between 1921 and 1992; in western Ger-many, between 1955 (when the country was still recovering from Hitler's war) and today, the increase was almost double that." Rising income in the world, and especially among the voters, has made education and general knowledge outside of formal classroom still further. "We are all middle class now," Beedham quotes a Western official -- "Not quite; but we are surely headed that way." Indeed, he notes ironically, "the democracies must therefore apply to themselves the argument they used to direct against the communists. As the old differences of education and social condition blur, it will be increasingly hard to go on persuading people that most of them are fit only to put a tick on a ballot paper every few years, and that the handful of men and women they thereby send to parliament must be left to make all the other decisions."
What is likely to come in the implicit competition between direct and indirect democracy over the next fifty years? And, what should we hope will come -- in short, which system appears to be better?
In answering both these questions, the analyst is hampered by the fact that so far, only the Swiss, as Tocqueville put it, have taken democracy "to such an extent" of populism. Nevertheless, it is not too early -- especially given 1,000 years of Swiss history, and 200 years of American evolution in the direction of direct democracy -- to make some meaningful speculations.
Of the likely direction of political evolution, it is nearly impossible to say where the experiment is likely to begin. But we can say with high confidence that experimentation with direct democracy is extremely likely -- almost certain.
There are nearly 150 democracies in the world today. The vast majority, if not all, face a curiously urgent pressure to reform either for experiential reasons (the recent democracies Russia and the Eastern Bloc, and much of Latin America), spiritual ones (America and Europe), practical political ones (Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and all the way out to China in the still-authoritarian Asian world), or material ones (Africa, India, Latin America).
We may think, in fact, in terms of those regional-political groups, as we analyze the likely course of democracy -- toward elitism, populism, or a muddled middle of relatively unchanging stasis (in political terms).
Western Europe, soon to be All-of-Europe, is closest to Swiss democracy in its politics and its material conditions, not to mention geography and language and common experience. It is, therefore, an obvious candidate for evolution towards the Swiss system. Europe has the least to fear from its affluent, well-informed citizens from allowing them a greater role in political decision making, and the flimsiest excuse for not doing so. As well, it has an obvious interest in both the negative side of federalism (letting communities go their own way where possible) and the positive side (finding political instruments of unity such as European referendum and initiative -- as the Swiss did in the nineteenth century).
These pressures will be focused further by the process of European integration. While the pressure from the rest of Europe on the Swiss to conform to its elitist system is obvious, indeed blatant, there is an equal and obvious pressure imposed from Switzerland on the European Union and its components. This pressure is not an instrument of Swiss policy at all; indeed, the Swiss fear to mention it. But much as Hong Kong represents an enclave within China that must either be crushed or emulated, so the Swiss populist system is within Europe. In this sense, it is remarkable how little has changed over 1,000 years.
While much discussion focuses on whether Switzerland should and will join the European Union, there is the equally important question of whether the European Union will join Switzerland. It may be that the latter will be extremely helpful to the former -- even essential.
It does not follow, however, that Europe will be the easiest system to reform, or the first to do so. The very fact that Western systems are so close to a populist, democratic breakthrough in popular access sets off powerful forces of resistance among those who like democracy the way it is -- comparatively inaccessible, vis-a-vis the Swiss direct method. This does not imply any kind of conspiracy. In fact, it would be impossible for the far Left, far Right, and (most important) "extreme centrist" forces to work together to resist direct democracy -- they disagree about too much. Rather, as any student of history knows, it is inertia and conventional wisdom that form the most powerful cabal. Or, to paraphrase a character from one of C.S. Lewis's novels, "Sometimes the most difficult heresy to combat is one very close to the truth." Furthermore, while Europe is the closest to a populist democratic system in terms of the sophistication and development of its people, it simultaneously faces the least pressure to reform.
Seldom in human affairs are revolutions made by those who need only move a bit to reach the new revolutionary principle. They are usually made by those who feel they may be about to fall over a cliff -- and will grasp at any expedient to stay in power.
Does anyone believe, for instance, that the Soviet Union was closer to democracy than China was in the late 1980s? My own analysis of this matter, in The Democratic Imperative, was that China was much closer to Western-style freedom up until Tienanmen Square -- and, in fact, Tienanmen Square proves how close China was. Yet the country has now lapsed back into a more profound authoritarianism, while Russia, for all its economic clumsiness, has passed through many of the hard choices and difficult transitions of trusting in the people.
The greatest likelihood of some European emulation of the Swiss system is that it will come about through necessity in some Eastern Bloc country, a Russia or Poland. The next most likely dynamic would be a European Union adoption of federalism and Euro-nationalism -- a European-wide referendum, limited by subject, but used as a unifying device in the formation of the new
European Nation. The Swiss themselves are often unimaginative about this matter -- they see their own helplessness in material terms, but often fail to understand the power of an idea, however small its application. Thus one Swiss author, considering the evolution of Europe, writes that "in the long run, Europe and Switzerland must merge into one system." Indeed they must -- or, since nothing is inevitable in human affairs, they are likely to -- but on whose terms? Whether Europe joins the Swiss, or the Swiss join Europe; whether China emulates Hong Kong, or Hong Kong is swallowed by China -- these are open questions. They will be settled, like all human history, by a combination of forces, brilliant personalities, and chance.
My own best guess is that there will be a European union, and it will be closer to the Swiss system in principle. If my ideas can be proven right or wrong by the record of prediction, this is one test for those ideas to stand on.
By a similar logic, the United States is even closer to Switzerland -- and yet, by the same token, some greater evolutionary distance away at the same time. There are two reasons, however, to suspect that the U.S., even closer to the Swiss democracy, may yet move toward it with even greater haste.
There are many forces which argue against this. One of them is the two dominant political parties. Only occasionally does a populist Republican, a Reagan, Kemp, or Roosevelt, break through the tone-deaf ethos of GOP elitism. For the most part, this is the party of "Bush, Eisenhower, and the golf course," as one foresighted author wrote in 1989.
The Democratic Party, though still mired in the economics of class warfare, has evolved significantly, and may offer a better road to consultative democracy than the Republicans. It is perhaps significant that the first proposal to extend Internet technologies to new institutional applications -- the digital democracy proposal of Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. -- came out of the Democratic Party.
A third possible avenue for the concepts of direct democracy is for some complete outsider to work under a banner of political reform. This might be a third party, though recent U.S. third parties, while speaking in populist rhetoric, have in fact had little to say about political reform from a popular access perspective. More likely, it would come from a complete outsider -- a businessman, journalist, or independent state politician who has a deep faith not in centrism, in placing himself in the middle of Left and Right elites, but in populism, the wisdom of the people.
It is hard to picture any of these three major parties making a major issue of direct democracy. But the latent interest in political reform among the American people is so strong that it would only take one leader.
Against all this, moreover, are some strong reasons to suspect that the United States will be the next great theater of advancement for direct democracy -- if not the next, the next major and pivotal theater.
America enjoys a strong tradition of political entrepreneurship and experimentation. A developed, "European" society, America was nevertheless the first country to emulate the Swiss experiment with referendum -- though only at the state level, a critical exception. In the late nineteenth century, America added direct election of Senators. In the twentieth century came voting rights for women and blacks. America, to a degree Europe outside of Switzerland is not, is a nation of immigrants, a cauldron of new people and new ideas. Small-business startups and entrepreneurship are traditionally higher per capita. America, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, remains animated by the philosophy, "make it new."
Perhaps most important, in the last fifty years, is the U.S. system of presidential and party primaries. Lacking in the parliamentary systems in Europe, the U.S. enjoys an ease of access at the front end not seen in most of Europe. This access is only for persons, not for ideas, but anyway, it matters.
It is difficult to imagine people like Jesse Ventura, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, Jesse Jackson -- and especially, a Ronald Reagan -- becoming major players in the European political scene. Rob Reiner (California anti-smoking initiative), Richard Gann (Proposition 13), or Polly Williams (Milwaukee voucher policy) are possible only in America -- or Switzerland. Europe is very comfortable with the idea of combining the rhetoric of popular access with an elitist systepi of government. America has some of that tradition, but also a vast experience at punching through to provide an even higher level of popular access.
It seems likely to me that the United States will beat Europe to the application of direct democracy at the national level, though this is only a likelihood. In some ways, Europe has already taken a first step, with the peoples of a number of European republics voting on EU membership itself. But popular consultation at the discretion of elites extends the new principle little, if at all. Hitler and Stalin, Pinochet and Marcos -- all held plebiscites when it suited them. The test of a new application of direct democracy will be its automaticity, the extent to which it takes place not at the caprice of leaders, but of the people.
Developing countries -- from Russia, a developed society but highly underdeveloped economy, to countries like Nigeria and Brazil and India -- stand far away from Swiss development and a Swiss political economy. But might they be more willing to take a stab at implementing some of its lessons for popular government?
Some argue -- perhaps wrongly -- that the gulf is too great for such countries for a leap-frog to direct democracy to be either plausible or desirable.
It is true that the distance between developing-country society is great. At the same time, such societies have less to lose and more to gain by jumping beyond the tired permutations of representative democracy and engaging in the greater risks but greater possibilities of populism.
Is the fundamental difference between Indian democracy and American a difference in the quality of citizens? Perhaps. But the far greater difference seems to be in the level of institutional and systemic development than in the capacity of the people. The same is true of Bolivia, Brazil, China, Russia, Nigeria, or Uganda.
This is not to say that the evolution, if it takes place first in the less affluent countries, should or will necessarily take the same shape, or move at the same pace, as it could in the United States or Europe. The racial, ethnic, and economic divisions of developing society, for one thing, are such that a higher degree of federalism might be needed -- while, of course, so is a unifying device such as the democratic quasi-sacrament of national referendum.
It might make sense for direct democracy, under such circumstances, to be adopted incrementally. Beedham, for example, recommends that some countries start with large, national matters, and small, particular ones, while leaving the bulk of questions in the middle up to more conventional, representative bodies for the time being. This is a sensible general recommendation, and may have even greater urgency for the developing world. It resembles, in fact, the road traveled by Switzerland in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Even for leaders dominated by the desire for mere material success, the logic of political experimentation is compelling. All nations are competing within the realm of "economic" policy to produce the best system -- with the result that the field is crowded. Most nations are competing to produce directly the most competitive educational, corporate, and other institutions, with little chance for any country, let alone one poor in resources, to stand out.
A country that tried to develop a somewhat superior political system, by contrast, would stand out. It would find, in all probability, that with superior political decision making would come better policies for the economy, education, foreign affairs, and other matters. Is this, in fact, not the road traveled by the United States and Switzerland over the last 200 years? Did not Japan leap into the industrial age most decisively in the mid-twentieth century, when alone among the Asian despotisms it adopted a significant degree of democracy?
The developing world thus competes closely with the United States as another likely arena for experimentation. Because the risks and benefits are higher, so is the likelihood of a misstep or even a crash. Possibly the idea of direct democracy will even suffer setbacks in the developing world, by being tried in imprudent ways, or adopted half-heartedly or in the wrong fields of activity. Even so there is a compelling case for it: Developing country invention in the political sphere is a vacuum, which politics abhors.
Which system is better?
The question is difficult to answer in a present time frame, except as a matter of expressing one's arbitrary preference. We may speculate endlessly about whether the people, or a group they choose, is more trustworthy.
Yet we need not confine ourselves to the present time frame, for in discussing democracy, especially Swiss democracy, we have 700 years or more of history for material -- and we can look many years ahead in making our forecast. It is sometimes easier to look across centuries, than across a generation.
Indeed, much of the discussion above has neglected what may be the most important element of discussion of all -- time.
The most important impact of Direct Democracy in Switzerland is its influence upon the citizen. There are, as we have mentioned, other contributing causes. And there is causality in the other direction: The high quality of Swiss citizens -- their interest and involvement in public affairs, their studious receptivity to information, their civic pride and community ethos -- helps make populist democracy possible. This latter phenomenon, however, is well known, in Switzerland and the West. The idea of a people being "ready" for democracy, being grown up enough to stand on a par with their elites, is familiar and accepted. Even the radical antitheses have some widespread acceptance. This was captured famously by the journalist William F. Buckley, in his witty declaration that he would rather be ruled by 200 persons chosen at random from the Boston telephone directory, than by the faculty of Harvard University.
What is poorly understood -- or anyway, not accepted and indeed vigorously denied by the collective subcousciousness of the Western elite -- is the extent to which democratic institutions help develop the citizen. And, that the more democratic the institutions, the more rapid and complete the development of the electorate.
The most important impact of Swiss democracy among the Swiss has involved the development of the Swiss people over time. Even in the short run, Swiss have a greater incentive to follow political issues and to think seriously about them -- they may well be voting on them in a few months. Over the longer run, a synergism of development sets in. The Swiss, with greater opportunity to make law, become skilled at making law much as, in the theory of representative democracy, members of Congress become skilled at legislative craftsmanship. The difference is that this phenomenon is spread over a whole society -- government "by the people" in the broadest sense.
Swiss politicians, journalists, and business leaders all, in turn, adjust their behavior accordingly. More focus is placed on informing, and listening to, the people, than in any other democracy.
As a result, and following long experience with popular sovereignty, the leaders and the led, the elites and the people, have a greater mutual respect and less alienation than in any other regime.
Imagine if every American were to serve on a jury three or four times a year. Is there any doubt that the people would be closer to the legal system, and the legal system more responsive to the people, were this the case? The mere proximity, the culture of greater interaction, would produce such effects. If added to this the citizens enjoyed greater leverage over the implementation of police policies, or the development of law, the effect would be multifold.
It is no different with the frequent exercise of sovereignty by the Swiss, over hundreds of years.
Indeed, it is ironic that in an age that so exults expertise, experience, and knowledge, so little attention is paid to a people that have more years of democratic history than any other. It seems strange that amidst all the hosannahs of a "global information age," there is so little thinking about global principles, and so little information about the world's most important and revealing democratic experiment.
At the center, radical in idea yet conservative in operation, is Switzerland. It is quiet and unassuming, but highly revealing. In some ways, it is the anti-America, but in this the two are naturally complementary. America is great in space, and has extended the democratic idea, as Lincoln and Thomas Paine hoped, across the world. But Switzerland is great in time, and has extended the democratic idea internally to an extent seen nowhere else.
"Empires such as the Swiss," as the advisor to King Louis once put it with unintended irony, "extend their empire by the bad example of their liberty."
It is possible to imagine our now-democratic world, like a latter-day global Athens, lapsing into despotism. This is actually far more possible than most present-day millenarians -- who only a decade ago were assuring us, "you can't change the Soviet system" -- can imagine.
It is possible too to imagine an end of history, an everlasting stasis in democracy as it is without further meaningful change. It is possible even to picture an Aquarian end to political and economic problems altogether.
Yet none of these is the most likely. Instead, a long but hopefully happy struggle, striving toward ever-more-perfect freedom, if never quite arriving -- in a word, history -- looms. A world of ideas and facts, labor and thought, good and -- yes -- evil, which none of the materialists, Marxist nor Libertarian, have abolished.
It is to this, real world of mankind that Switzerland has so much to offer. In this world, it may well be, as Victor Hugo cryptically insisted: "Switzerland will have the last word in history."
Notes 1. All this is quite aside from the fact that the dialectical materialists of the Right and Left are wrong altogether. History never ends, there are no completely new ideas under the sun, and what appears at one point or another in history to be the "final verdict" on behalf of good or evil is never more than a turn of the wheel from a different order. Whether we are considering the end of war proclaimed in the late nineteenth century, the end of material want in the mid-twentieth century, or the "abolition of borders" and a "world without money" by Internet companies and technology executives in the early twenty-first century, the stubborn resiliency of human nature remains. That history tends to favor the most just polity is clear, as the author argues in The Democratic Imperative, especially Chap. 3, "Ideopolitique." Between tendency and inevitability, however, is a wide and important gulf.
2. Brian Beedham, "A better way to vote: Why letting the people themselves take the decisions is the logical next step for the West," The Economist, 11 September 1993. Beedham is an associate editor of The Economist and was its foreign editor from 1964 to 1989.
3. See Carol L. Schmid's interesting survey, Conflict and Consensus in Switzerland, University of California Press, 1981.
4. In the paragraphs that follow we are speaking mainly about the spirit of direct democracy and of its acts insofar as they are different. Switzerland has a parliament and president too, and there is lobbying and grass-roots lobbying aimed at the parliament. But in those cases Switzerland, which itself is a mixed system, is acting as a representative democracy. Because it frequently acts as a direct democracy, however, the resulting "spirit of the laws," the animating logic of political activity, may be very different.
5. In the combined national parliamentary elections of 1999, according to an academic estimate cited by Aargauer Zeitung editor Peter Frey, the Swiss spent a total of 100 million Swiss francs.