Direct Democracy
Discussion
Critique
Stephen Shalom:
"Direct democracy is an alternative to representative democracy. Under direct democracy people make decisions themselves rather than choosing others to do it for them. There are several variants of direct democracy. One of these is referendum democracy, where every issue is put to the population as a whole. In the past such an approach was simply impossible: there was no mechanism for allowing large numbers of people to cast ballots on a nearly daily basis. But modern technology makes this possible on a vast scale. People could use the internet first to access as much background information as they wanted and then to vote on their preferred options.
But even if technically possible, would we really want to spend all this time exhaustively studying the many hundreds of issues that national legislatures currently take up each year. Those legislators are doing this more or less full-time. Do we all want to invest that same amount of time (while doing some other job as well)? Legislators typically have a staff to make the work manageable. Would each citizen have a staff person? Clearly some means is needed to separate the important issues out from all the rather routine issues that legislators currently deal with.
Beyond this time problem, referendum democracy suffers from another defect: when people make decisions that do not emerge from participation in some sort of deliberative process, their off-the-cuff opinions are more likely to be intolerant and uninformed. Whereas deliberation encourages people to seek common ground and find ways to take seriously the opinions of others, voting in a referendum encourages people to express their pre-existing views on polarized positions. " (http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22017)