Direct Democracy

The world has been watching California’s political and fiscal troubles, and the world is blaming our direct democracy.

So wherever there’s talk of expanding the rights of people to decide on laws or constitutional amendments, a new criticism ring: Let’s not let our country/province/city become another California.

California is hardly the only place where voters, through initiative and referendum, make important decisions about government. As the state struggles with persistent budgetary and political problems, the world has been watching, with a combination of wonder and horror. What do direct democrats around the world think as they look at California? What might California learn from the world about its direct democratic system? And what might the rest of the world learn from us?

Here in California, crisis is giving way to opportunity. The state's apocalyptic budget situation has yielded an equally dramatic solution: retooling state government through a citizen-initiated constitutional convention.

The rest of the country would be wise not only to pay attention, but to follow suit. California, the ungovernable, holds lessons for the United States, the ungovernable. And if history is any guide, what happens in California – from political movements to cultural revolutions to technological innovations – winds up being replicated throughout the nation.

In a Fox & Hounds Daily post, I compare California's system of ballot initiatives against the international "code of good conduct" for direct democratic elections that's been advanced by the Venice Commission.

SEOUL - Former U.S. Sen. Mike Gravel (D-Alaska), a 2008 Democratic candidate for president, has been the leading advocate of introducing the ballot initiative at the federal level in America. But, as Gravel told the 2009 Global Forum on Modern Direct Democracy here Monday, he's been frustrated in his efforts in the U.S.

I think this story from the Kansas City Star officially confirms it: we're in the midst of a national reassessment of the initiative and referendum. (Hat tip: Bruno Kaufmann).

Friend of the blog Dennis Engbarth, a Taiwan-based journalist, writes with news of a threat to that country's new direct democracy: the party of President Ma Ying-jeou's, the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang, is trying to purge leadership of the Taiwan Democracy Foundation.

The foundation promotes democracy and has funded efforts to study direct democracy, which have led to the establishment of the referendum in Taiwan. Ma opposes direct democracy.

Last fall, I attended the first global forum on direct democracy, held in Aarau, Switzerland. Academics, journalists, and activists from 35 countries showed up. I can't explain how helpful the event was to my thinking. In California's daily political life, it's easy to think that the initiative and referendum process we have here are fixed things. But in a global perspective, we're a strange outlier, with an inflexible process.

Both the outgoing governor, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary-nominee Janet Napolitano, and her successor, Jan Brewer, have called for major reform of the state's initiative process. So has the Arizona Republic, in this recent editorial. It's hard to blame them. Arizona saw perhaps unprecedented signature fraud last year. A typical validity rate for signatures collected in an initiative campaign is 70 percent.

A new law in Guam requires that an initiative measure rejected by voters can't appear on the ballot again for at least three years. California and most other direct democracy states don't have laws like this. Perhaps they should.