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makes me envy of Switzerland's "enough signatures causes referendum which actually does create a new law" system
by NooneAtAll3 4mo ago
makes me envy of Switzerland's "enough signatures causes referendum which actually does create a new law" system
- Barrin92 4mo agothe Swiss can only propose new constitutional amendments, not statutory laws. And precisely to avoid having what is supposed to be a technical decision into an overly broad popular vote, because those are still supposed to belong into parliamentary debate. Because if people voted on every single regulation you'd be at the ballot box five times a day.
- izacus 4mo agoYou should check out Swiss constitution sometimes to see how true that is :P
- Symbiote 4mo agoProportional to the respective populations, this would have needed roughly four times as many signatures to get to that level in Switzerland.
- NooneAtAll3 4mo agoif so, making that failure more explicit would also be of great help
- phyzix5761 4mo agoSo, mob rule?
- necovek 4mo agoSome would more amicably call it democracy, but to each their own.
- keybored 4mo agoDemocracy is mob rule when I don’t like it. Democratic activity is populism when I don’t like it.
- hobofan 4mo agoMore direct democracy also makes it more attackable for misinformation campaigns (trying to offer a populist answer to complex problems).
- keybored 4mo agoThat more democracy is more attackable is not a coherent position. More democracy means more people power. But people being powerless to resist misinformation campaigns means that they do not have power. Which means that it is not really democracy. This is the same as saying that democracy is being undermined by wealth inequality. If money can buy political power and money is unevenly distributed then it’s not a democracy. If one was actually interested in actual democracy one would fix that misinformation asymmetry.
- bjelkeman-again 4mo agoAnd that, I would argue, is rooted in wealth inequality.
- nairboon 4mo agoFor this argument to work, you'd need to show that a generic politician is somehow immune to misinformation campaigns/lobbyism.
- hobofan 4mo agoIt's reasonable to at least expect that. It's their job after all, while for any single voter there is a lower standard you can realistically hold them too and less time available to verify/debunk claims. On top of that, there are also instruments that help the voters track whether politicians are engaging in corrupt lobbyism like voting records + donation / campaign contribution records, though few countries do that to a degree that it forms a cohesive anti-corruption framework. None of those measures exist for individual voters.