Direct democracy is open to being hijacked by populism

The argument

The vulnerability this argument identifies is structural rather than incidental. Direct democracy has few checks or balances and is based upon the notion that the majority of the populace will be right. Where a representative system interposes deliberation, committee scrutiny, revision, and the prospect of a later parliament undoing the work of an earlier one, a direct vote produces a single verdict on a single day with nothing downstream to test it. The safeguards that a representative system spends most of its time operating are simply absent. What fills that gap is simplification. Complicated issues often have to be boiled down for the public into straight forward positions, because a referendum must be answerable — usually yes or no — by everyone at once. That reduction is not a neutral act. Whoever performs it decides which of an issue's many dimensions the public is asked about, and the version that reaches the ballot paper is inevitably the version somebody found it useful to put there. This democratic absolutism is therefore open to being hijacked by nativist sentiments and ideological extremists. A campaign offering a simple story holds an advantage over one that must explain a complicated arrangement, and in a contest settled by a single majority there is no institutional counterweight to that advantage — no chamber of revision, no requirement to govern afterwards on the same claims. The recent referendums in the UK on its membership of the European Union and on the question of Scottish Independence are offered as evidence that the danger is not merely theoretical: they have shown that populists are easily able to manipulate direct democratic initiatives and polarise the electorate. Representative democracy is better, on this argument, not because voters cannot be trusted with decisions, but because it retains the machinery that catches what a single vote cannot.

Premises

Counter-arguments

In a direct democracy the people are the government. They vote directly for the policies that they favour giving them a level of say in government policy that representative democracy is unable to match. Increased levels of direct democracy also challenge the notion of a political ‘elite’ who are designated to rule in the people's stead, as it is the people, not a parliament or monarch which is considered sovereign.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A direct democracy is a more representative way of voting, regardless of the framing of the issue.