A Law That Forces the Legislature to Answer One Question Every Two Months

Here is a proposal that is not direct democracy, does not require anyone to give up power, and would still change the political system more than most reforms that are actually debated.

Every two months, the yes-or-no question that the most citizens have voted to ask is put to the legislature, and every member must answer it, on the record, with a vote.

That is the whole law. The public does not decide anything. No policy changes as a result of the answer. The question is simply asked, and it may not be dodged.

The Questions People Would Ask

Try to imagine what would come up. I do not have to guess very hard, because these are the questions the public already asks and the system already refuses to hear.

• Is it acceptable that the security services collect the information they collect on citizens?
• Should we continue selling arms to regimes that torture their own people?
• Is the current distribution of wealth fine as it is?
• Are politicians more influenced by money than by what is right?
• Does God exist?

Look at what those have in common. Every one is a question that the executive and the legislature would rather never be forced to answer in public. Some are questions on which the two large parties quietly agree and would prefer the voters not notice. Some are questions where the honest answer is unsayable and the dishonest one is checkable. The last one is a question that every member of the house has an answer to and none would put to a vote, and I include it because the discomfort it produces is the point.

Why Asking Is Not Nothing

The objection is obvious: a vote that binds nobody is theatre. I think that is wrong, for three reasons.

It ends the option of silence. The most important tool a representative body has is not lying but not answering. The great questions are kept off the agenda, and the agenda is controlled by the people who benefit from their absence. I have argued before that an institution can outlive the public's settled desire to be rid of it simply because nobody with power ever has to say, on the record, that it should stay. This law removes that refuge, one question at a time.

It produces a record. Once every member has voted on whether arms sales to dictatorships should continue, the position exists. It can be quoted at the next election. It can be compared with the member's donations. It can be compared with what the member said to a different audience. Today a politician can hold every position on a question at once, because he has never been made to hold any. A recorded vote collapses the superposition.

It reveals the gap between the house and the public. The public chose the question because it wanted an answer, and in most cases the public's answer is not in doubt. When the house then votes the other way, or splits along lines that have nothing to do with the question, the distance between representatives and represented is measured and published, every two months, by the representatives themselves.

What It Would Do to the Parties

The party system runs on bundles: you vote for a package assembled by someone else, and the package never has to be defended item by item. I have written about how this forces every debate to an altitude at which nothing true can be said.

A compulsory question breaks the bundle open. It asks about one thing. A member who has spent a career being for the environment and for growth, for security and for privacy, for the working man and for the donor, must now pick one side of one question, and his colleagues must do the same, and the votes will not line up with the party. The public would discover, six times a year, that the packages they were sold do not correspond to anything the members actually believe.

That discovery is the beginning of the end for bundled politics, and it requires no change to how anyone is elected.

What It Would Not Do

I want to be honest about the limits, because the proposal is modest and its modesty is the argument for it.

It would not stop arms sales. It would not redistribute anything. It would not prevent the executive from doing the opposite of what the house just said. It is not direct democracy, and anyone who called it that would be wrong.

It is a device for extracting information from a system built to withhold it. The public would learn, reliably and repeatedly, where its representatives stand on the questions the public cares about most, and the representatives would learn that the days of standing nowhere were over.

Why I Think This Is the Right First Step

Real direct democracy, deciding questions rather than selecting personnel, frightens people. They imagine the public voting to abolish taxes or execute someone on Tuesday. I think the fear is misplaced, but I also think it is not going to be argued away, and a reform that depends on winning that argument first is a reform that waits forever.

This proposal skips the fear. Nothing is decided by the public. The worst that can happen is that the legislature is embarrassed six times a year. And in the course of being embarrassed it would teach the population two things it currently has no way to learn: what its representatives actually think, and how little that has to do with what the population thinks.

A population that has learned those two things will ask for the rest on its own. That is the half way, and it is the half that does the work.