It ensures that government is representative of the people

The argument

In a direct democracy, the people are the government. Citizens do not choose someone to decide on their behalf; they vote directly for the policies they favour, and the result of that vote is the decision. Representation drops out of the process because nothing is left for it to do. The advantage this confers is one of fidelity. A representative system can only ever approximate what the public wants, because it bundles hundreds of separate questions into a single choice between candidates. A voter who agrees with a party on one issue and disagrees on another has no way to register both, and must take the package whole or reject it whole. Direct democracy puts each question separately, which gives citizens a level of say in government policy that representative democracy is unable to match — not merely more influence, but influence exercised on the specific matters they care about. The second claim concerns who is understood to be sovereign. Increased levels of direct democracy challenge the notion of a political elite designated to rule in the people's stead. Where decisions are taken by the public itself, there is no class of professional decision-makers whose judgement substitutes for the public's, and no standing argument that ordinary citizens are too ill-informed or too intemperate to be trusted with questions that affect them. What is sovereign is the people, not a parliament or a monarch acting in their name. Both points bear on the same standard. If government is meant to represent the people, then the arrangement representing them most accurately is the one in which their decisions simply are the government's decisions. Because direct democracy ensures that, it is superior to representative democracy.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Direct democracy has few checks or balances and is based on the notion that the majority of the populace will be right. This democratic absolutism is open to being hijacked by nativist sentiments and ideological extremists, as complicated issues often have to be boiled down for the public into straight forward positions. The recent referendums in the UK on its membership of the European Union and on the question of Scottish Independence have shown that populists are easily able to manipulate direct democratic initiatives and polarise the electorate.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] This is not a superior system - the average person does not have the expertise necessary to vote on policies.