Direct Democracy Can Be More Liberal Than Any Representative Regime

The standard fear about direct democracy is that it would be less liberal than what we have: that the mob would vote away minorities' rights, and that representatives are the buffer protecting liberty from the crowd. I want to argue the reverse. Representative regimes have a structural ceiling on how liberal they can be, and direct democracy does not.

We Want More Liberty, Not Less

First the premise, because it is often left implicit.

Most people in free societies want to be more liberal than they currently are, on more subjects. They want to talk openly about religion without a taboo descending. They want a serious public discussion of euthanasia rather than a whispered one. They want the questions of adolescent sexuality, drug policy, gay rights, the limits of speech, and a dozen others handled as questions rather than as embarrassments.

By liberal here I mean something specific: willing to let people live as they choose, and willing to argue any question openly. That is what is wanted. And on most of these subjects the representative system delivers less of it than the population would support.

The Ceiling

Here is the structural problem.

A representative regime is weak. Not in the sense of lacking an army, but in the sense that its hold on power is thin and contested at every election. Because it is weak, it is vulnerable to minorities: any organised group with a grievance, a turnout advantage, or a donor list can make a governing party's life difficult.

Now, some of the most effective minorities in any society are those working against liberality. Religious establishments, moral panics, industries that profit from a prohibition, communities that want the state to enforce their customs on their own members. These groups are organised, motivated, and permanent, which is exactly the profile that beats a diffuse majority.

So a representative regime must remain somewhat illiberal in order to survive. Not because its members are illiberal, but because the illiberal minorities can hurt it and the liberal majority cannot help it enough to compensate. The regime buys its own stability by declining to open certain questions. It is not defending liberty from the crowd. It is defending itself from the organised.

The Second Problem: Coarseness

There is a further limitation, and it is about resolution rather than courage.

A representative regime is coarse. It runs through parties, and a party is a single package. That package has to be roughly consistent, because voters and journalists punish visible contradiction. So a party cannot easily be extremely liberal on one question and extremely restrictive on another. It has to pick a temperature and hold it across the menu.

This produces absurd results. Suppose a society wants to be very liberal about gay rights and, at the same time, very hard on militant religious movements that preach against those same rights. Those two positions are perfectly coherent: both are pro-liberty. But no party can comfortably hold both, because one reads as left and one reads as right, and the package would look incoherent to the people whose job is to keep packages coherent.

So the society gets neither position fully. It gets a blend, set at the temperature the party can defend, which is warmer than the majority wants on one question and cooler than it wants on the other.

Why Direct Democracy Has Neither Problem

Take the two problems in turn.

On weakness: a direct democracy is not vulnerable to minorities in the same way, because there is no governing party for a minority to threaten. An organised group can campaign, argue, and vote. It cannot make a legislature's life difficult, because there is no legislature whose life is the lever. The illiberal minority's advantage, which was always its ability to punish a small group of decision-makers, has nothing to act on.

On coarseness: a direct democracy decides questions one at a time. There is no package to keep consistent. The society can vote to be as liberal as it likes on gay rights on Tuesday and as hard as it likes on militant religion on Thursday, and nobody has to explain how the two fit on a platform, because there is no platform. Each question gets the answer the society actually holds, at the resolution the society actually holds it.

Direct democracy can be very liberal on one issue and very illiberal on another, and that fine grain is precisely what liberality requires. Liberty is not a single dial. It is a thousand separate questions, and a system that can only turn one dial will always be less liberal than one that can answer each.

The Fear, Revisited

Would the majority sometimes vote against a minority's freedom? Yes, sometimes, and I do not want to wave that away. Majorities have done ugly things.

But look at where the ugly things have mostly come from in representative systems: from the organised illiberal minority capturing the regime, not from the diffuse majority overruling it. Prohibitions, blasphemy laws, censorship, sodomy statutes, and the criminalisation of private choices have in nearly every case been the work of a motivated few using the state's weakness, held long after the population had moved on, because reopening them would cost a party its partner.

The representative system did not protect us from those. It produced them and preserved them. A system with no partner to lose would at least have let us vote them away.