Emily Laskin

Yes, I hate direct democracy

We just had elections in California, and it roughly coincided with the deadline for gathering signatures to get propositions on the ballot in the upcoming general elections. This reminded me: I hate initiatives and referendums and ballot measures and propositions, the "direct democracy" mechanism that allows U.S. citizens, particularly in Western states, to put legislation directly on ballots.

You know how there are certain points in an election cycle where you can't go to a grocery store in the Bay Area without several people asking you something like "do you vote in Alameda County and do you believe that people should live in homes"? Yes and yes, of course. But no, I don't want to sign your janky sheet so that some initiative whose political origin and content are a complete mystery to me can get on the ballot next year. Also, it seems like you have a crappy job, which does make me a little bit more inclined to sign the janky sheet, because I feel bad for you, but additionally gives me some misgivings about the metapolitics of this whole encounter. So yeah, those. I hate those.

Allow me to explain, but first, allow me to reassure you: I know that Republicans have a long history of attacking direct democracy mechanisms, and even though I hate ballot initiatives, this is not a case where the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Republicans are not my friend and I don't agree with them on this issue. They try to undermine the power of ballot initiatives because they don't want citizens to have any significant power (despite promoting themselves as the party of personal freedom, but far be it from me to write the world's one millionth piece of Internet content about how Republicans are hypocritical).

I want citizens to have significant power. I want a form of governance where people who have particular knowledge about a particular social or political context, or who are beholden by proclivity or necessity to some special political interest, are as fully empowered as possible to make decisions about laws that affect their lives. I also think our current "direct democracy" measures are really far from accomplishing that goal.

The long and tragic tale of my beef with citizen initiatives

When I was in 11th grade, I wrote a paper about this, for my U.S. history class. I don't remember how I got onto the topic, but if I had to guess it was because I got so annoyed at being accosted by people gathering signatures. On the other hand, when I was in 11th grade I looked like I was 12, so I don't think anyone was approaching me for signatures. Maybe they were accosting my mom. Still, misanthropy runs deep.

Anyway, I also don't remember much about what I argued in the paper, but I do remember that I tried really hard on the assignment, and I even talked my way into the University of Washington local history archives and read some Progressive Era political pamphlets on the topic. I was kind of an intense high schooler. And though I'm fuzzy on the specifics, I do remember that my main objection was that the way that Washington State, where I went to high school, runs citizens initiatives leaves that part of the political process wide open to capture by special interests, which aren't necessarily bad, but are at best a distraction for most people, and at worst can be a sanctioned venue for outright propaganda and voter manipulation.

Also, I'm partisan on these matters — I want progressive/left legislation, and ballot initiatives just don't deliver. Think about the 2024 California elections, where voters chose (Prop 32) specifically not to raise the state's minimum wage, and (Prop 6) to keep language in the state's constitution that authorizes slavery (aka "involuntary servitude") in certain circumstances (the punishment of crimes). The actual practical effect that Prop 6 would have had, had it passed is a bit difficult to reason about. It put forward an end to system California currently uses, which allows the state to extract forced labor from incarcerated people and to punish them beyond the terms of their prison sentences if they don't comply. It would not have ended incarceration in the state. State Republicans and various conservative groups opposed it, but submitted no formal argument against it. State Democrats and various progressive groups supported it, claimed that it enjoyed wide bipartisan support, and advertised it heavily as the "End Slavery In California Act." I don't expect every voter in California to do extensive research on every ballot measure, but the fact that that somewhat simplified but pretty (hopefully!?) irrefutable framing didn't pass gives me pause.

Pause about what, though? About the whole process? I mean I guess there is a legible, if not a reasonable, argument that if the People of California want to keep on permitting slavery in the state constitution, we ought to let them. Direct democracy, amirite? Certainly I'm not trying to argue for a nanny state. No, it gives me pause because what if it's not that Californians really want to keep on having forced labor in prisons and feel strongly about it, but rather that the general voting public has reading comprehension issues? And how are policymakers and analysts supposed to discern the difference?

This type of problem is vexing when it's about something, like "end slavery," that should be a no-brainer, and potentially frightening when it's about something more nuanced — and some things that end up on ballot measures are indeed hard to parse, as proposed legislation, or hard to reason about, as society-wide ethical problems. Take Prop 5, which dealt with the voter approval required for the issuance of local bonds to fund public housing and some other public infrastructure. Prop 5, had it passed, would have reduced the voter approval required for these types of bonds and projects from a two thirds supermajority to 55%. So the question it posed, really, was whether a smaller than is the current standard portion of concerned citizens in a city or county should be able to approve the funding of public housing and infrastructure. On one hand, this seems like the perfect thing to hand over to citizens via ballot initiatives, because it pushes decision making to the edges, to the people most concerned with and impacted by the decision. And many parts of California are facing serious housing shortages, a problem exacerbated by the fact that groups like coalitions of landlords have a lot of extra money and therefore time on their hands to lobby against anything that would negatively impact their revenue streams. So lowering the bar for voter approval and, therefore, potentially giving more weight to the votes of people who really care about public housing and infrastructure in a given place and show up to the polls about it; and removing the ability of just a third of voters, a small enough group to be meaningfully influenced by special interests like landlord coalitions, to block public housing and infrastructure projects — all of this makes a certain kind of sense for those of us who support progressive policy. But...

The ballot measure was confusingly worded. Some groups objected that it had too loose a definition of "public infrastructure." Others argued that more bond debt would lead to higher local property taxes. Opponents successfully shifted the discourse around this measure so that instead of being a question of the ethics and pragmatics of local control over local government actions, it became a debate that pitted "taxpayers" aka property owners against less wealthy segments of the population, who disproportionately depend on public housing and, to a lesser extent, other types of public infrastructure. The debate about this proposition within the fairly politically uniform left/progressive circles I run in was heated and confusing. A number of progressive groups declined to take a position. Prop 5 failed and I'm not sure how to interpret the effect of that failure.

California still does need more affordable housing, though.

Everyone says they want liberty; no one delivers

Here's the obvious counterargument: we hired people to make these kinds of decisions for us. They're called legislators, and they have rules and regulations and procedures and knowledge, or at least committees, and accountability (maybe). We should leave confusing policy decisions to them, right? I know, I know! There are problems: they get captured by moneyed interests; people care arguably even less about electing their local representatives than the do about voting yes or no on a confusing sentence; some of them are corrupt, or immoral, or they suck in some other way. Direct democracy from the Progressive Era was an attempt to restore some accountability and citizen power in the legislative process.

On the other hand, we have some cause, these days, to be skeptical of all expressions of populist feeling, which ballot measures explicitly are. I'm actually not making a veiled argument that the populace should "leave it to the experts," though. I wish we had a stronger culture of respect for trained experts, in this country, but I think there is also every reason to believe that people are experts regarding their own experience and circumstances, often make rational choices given the information they have, etc. But my utopian desires aside, I am actually trying to point out that there's something seriously twisted up in the ideology of this mechanism, which was intended to put power in the hands of voters.

The party of individual liberty (supposedly) opposes direct democracy and usually works to undermine it, both in the instances it appears on the ballot and as a system, when possible. The party of civil liberties as an institution (supposedly) will usually throw its weight behind direct democracy measures that would increase citizens' protections, but it's hard to see the value of that support when that party's representatives increasingly abdicate their responsibility to fight for them in the actual state and federal legislatures. In a way, the Republican position is more honest: that party is the party of power, and its representatives will validate ideology that aligns with it.

The Democratic position, well, it's incoherent. Direct democracy gets pitched as "power to the people" but more often than not it looks like legislators shrugging and saying "you do it" to voters. Pushing decisions to the edges is a worthy goal. But ballot measures and the like tend to push special interests to the edges, with the effect that whoever has the money to gather signatures for their pet thing sets the agenda, and voters — who sometimes have no real stake or specific expertise — get only the binary choice to approve or not. This mechanism purports to devolve power, but it's really little more than another example of capture.