mindstalk | (Reply)

Is Switzerland, with 3-4x referendum events per year, radical?

A mean reply would be that you want better government but not to have to work for it.

More substantially, I've liked the idea of PR myself, especially open party list, though I also like the ideae of a randomly selected house (sortition.) But I've also been getting an impression of welfare states under siege throughout the rich world, including some of the countries you name. So I started a threat on RPG.net recently asking non-Americans what they think their countries think of their governments (asking for general unpopularity, not "I don't like them") and I got a lot of positive hits, claimed dissatisfaction with privatization and austerity policies, in Sweden, the Netherlands, and New Zealand. Not to mention Spain and Greece, though Spain's PR is badly parameterized, memory says. Sweden's PM is apparently an Ayn Rand fan.

Belgium's actually doing better in macro than the Netherlands, maybe because they didn't have a government that could pull them down the road of austerity policies... but yes, they went like 500+ days without forming a government.

I need a longer post to do this properly, but I'm thinking pure representative democracy is intrinsically falled, PR or not. Elective oligarchy, really. You elect a few people every few years to make all the decisions, and you can't even fire them at will; governments may fall, but there's no recall procedures. So you've got the principal-agent problem: do officials do what the voters want them to do? And there's a more fundamental bandwidth problem: even if officials did, how precisely can voters tell them what to do? If you choose 1 out of 8 options, that's 3 bits, an ability to pin down answers to 3 independent yes/no questions. That's not a lot. The US has two parties but it also has primaries, so we're often not as bad as it looks. Combine the two problems, and I'd guess electorates get to express an average of half a bit per year.

By contrast, one referendum per month gives you 12 bits a year, and the Swiss are probably clocking that. Plus the possible effect of the threat of referendums keeping the legislature in majoritarian line in general.

If a country naturally divided up into factions then it would seem like PR lets those factions get representation nicely. But it's not clear countries do. Or that factions like "poor people" really get adequately represented, against the selection effect of elections. A random legislature would be more statistically representative; I'm not sure if such a house would obviate the need for referendums.

The Swiss do have relatively low turnout, so I can see worrying about quality. OTOH the country seems well-run, though alas no Swiss on RPG.net to chime in with their opinions. And for a conservative country of bankers, they've been doing things like reining in CEO pay and putting basic income on the ballot. They also have a surprisingly low (Good) Gini index *before* taxes and transfers, though the Nordics overtake them afterwards. Real democracy seems good for economic populism... which is exactly what the US Federalists were afraid of and wanted to prevent.