There are meany reasons that convinced me that direct democracy is a superior system. Today I will discuss direct democracy and minorities.
Direct democracy essentially fulfils the definition of democracy; “government by the people”. Direct democracy does that because it puts in place the mechanisms enabling the voters to prevail over the executive and the legislative.
In a direct democracy votes have veto over policies and legislation whenever voters believe that it is necessary to stop them. But direct democracy goes a step further; it removes from the highest court in the land the power to overturn the results of public referendums. In a direct democracy, no judges interpret the constitution, only by voting do the people decide what is part of the constitution.ç
The first impression of someone who does not really know how democracy works, could be: “but if the people have the final decision-making power. could not that become the tyranny of the majority?”, “aren’t mos people ignorant of the technical aspects of issues for them to vote in a competent way?, will not the elected politicians and the experts they consult, reach more competent decisions than ordinary voters?”
The answer to those doubts are no.
We haver the evidence of Switzerland, the best managed, less polarized, most stable, most prosperous, with the lowest employment, better universal health care, highest trust in politicians, etc.
But, does the fact that Switzerland has been practising direct democracy for the past 154 years have anything to do with where Switzerland stands now in the World? I believe so. Switzerland is not 100% direct democracy; the politicians develop policies and laws, but the people, when they choose to, have veto power on anything the politicians do. The people can also decide that politicians must implement policies and laws even when the politicians had no intention of doing so, or may even oppose them. So, while, formally, Switzerland is a direct-representative democracy, because the voters ahve more power than the politicians, Switzerland eseentially is a direct democracy because “the people govern”, the voters prevail by referendum, on any issue they want to prevail.
In my view, the major reason why a direct democracy has not become “the tyranny of the majority” is because direct democracy makes the majority feel secure. As we know, when people feel secure, are often more flexible and tolerant.
But there is another factor; when the people have the control of, for example, how the education system will work, they know that if lower income areas have, on top of being poorer, an inferior education system, not only poverty will be harder to escape, it is also more likely that crime will rise. We all know that the major victims of crime, assaults, theft, etc., are ordinary people because the “upperclasses”, including the political class, often live lives which protect them and, therefore make them less sensitive to the problems crime causes in then lives of ordinary people, no matter how many sound bites they generate about the relationship between poverty and crime. So, direct democracy does not become a tyranny at all, it becomes the opposite, better democracy for all.
Another area of friction in many societir is languaage-culture. Again, Switzerland is the example. They mamage to accomodate their minorities like nowhere else; with 64% German speakers, the French and Italian minorities, even the tiny Romansh minority, of less than 50 000 people, none of those minorities feels oppressed.
No doubt it is, among other reasons, because German-speaking majority understands tha peaceful coexistence with minorities requieres respect. The German-speakers show that respect by recognizing that in areas where the clearly dominant language in not German, the members of the minorities do not have to learn or speak German and the official and often, only language in the area is French or Italian, not German.
But is does not end here; the German-speaking majority, as well as the French minority, which is the largest minority, and represents 23% of the Swiss population, seem to have recognized it would not be a good idea to identify language and culture with territory. The result is that the German-speaking population is organized in 17 German-speaking only cantons, the French in 4 French-speaking only cantons. The Italian speakers have one canton, and the Romansh-speakers share one bilingual canton with German-speakers. The rest of the cantons are also bilingual, mostly German-French, perhaps because the populations are geographically intermingled in those cantons and gets along smoothly.
However, far from being “tyrannical”, majorities in Switzerland are flexible, even when it comes to letting the minority in one canton break away to form their own canton or join and adjacent canton of a different language.
This is what the German-speaking majprity of Canton of Bern; they agreed, by popular referendum, that the French-speaking minority of the canton could create their own canton. This happened in 1979. More recently, some French speaking towns of the Canton of Bern, who in the earlier referendum decided tt stay in this German-speaking canton, held a referendum to leave the Canton of Bern and join the Canton of Jura, the majority and the minority voted, the resul was that the argument of minority won the majority of German-speakers over; the official reconfiguration of the cantons of Jura and Bern will take place in 2026.
Just try to do something similar in the US. For example, giving areas that are mostly Spanish-speaking, or native American-speaking, or culturally black areas, their own states. Or try to create out of Quebec a new English-speakinh province of Montreal West-Eastern Townships for 500 000 to 900 000 people, or a French-speaking province out of the French-speaking areas of New Brunswick. Or how about native-american speaking cantons or cantons of Eskimos. In Switzerland they hace several very small cantons with population of less than 70 000 people, one as low as 15 000, this means that minorities in a direct democracy can be accommodated quite well and prevent the problems that minorities that feel oppresses suffer, and that become problems for the majority too.
But it is not just the US or Canada. If you go to France, Spain, Belgium and other countries, you can see the mess their cultural-language relations are in. Even the UK, in spite of its long history of stability, divded its territory along language-culture borders. If the UK did what Switzerland did, it would have several English-speaking cantons out of England, and some too out of Scotland, may be even Wales.
So, to have fewer “oppressed minority” problems in your country, direct democracy could go a long way to accommodate them, precisely because direct democracy gives the majority the sense of being the majority that they, logically, need because, humans are territorial, but when they feel secure, they can also be flexible.
The key factor is that in Switzerland, the majority decides, not the politicians. Ordinary people, when they directly decide, are far more sensible than the politicians who, often can not resist using language, race, etc., as a way to get votes. This inevitably, polarises the minorities. When voters are responsible for what happens on the ground they vote mnuch more sensibly than the politicians. The people focus on the facts of the issue, politicians always focus on the next election and because of that generate polarisation and generate solutions contaminated by ideology.
But it is necessary to study in detail how the Swiss manage direct democracy because, like in most everything, “the devil is in the details”.
Victor Lopez
