Direct Democracy Does Not Decide Technical Questions, It Decides Who Inspects Them

The standard objection to direct democracy is that the public cannot possibly vote on everything. Nobody has the time or the expertise to decide the specification of a water treatment plant, the terms of a defence procurement contract, or the dosage schedule in a vaccination programme. Ask people to vote on those and you get either apathy or nonsense.

The objection is correct, and it misses the point, because direct democracy as I mean it was never about technical decisions.

What the Highest Level Buys You

The version of direct democracy I argue for concerns decisions at the highest level only. Whether to go to war. What the tax structure should broadly be. Whether to sell arms to a particular regime. Whether the state should run a lottery. How the largest sums are divided between large purposes.

That set is small enough for a population to follow, and it is the set that matters. Deciding it directly does three things. It sets the general mood and direction of a society. It lets the public override decisions that go against it on a large scale, which under representation it cannot do. And it makes it possible to pass laws that are for the people and against the government, which a legislature will not pass, since the legislature is the government.

None of this touches the technical layer, and it should not. People do not have the time, and, more to the point, they do not have the motivation. Motivation to engage is something people only have for the large questions. Ask them about the small ones and they will, rightly, decline.

So the Technical Layer Stays Bad?

Here is where the objection assumes too much. It assumes that if the public does not decide a technical question, the technical question is decided as it is now, by an official under whatever pressures currently act on officials.

But the public does not need to decide the technical question. It needs to decide, once, how technical questions get inspected.

Consider a jury system for technical decisions. A specialised official makes the decision, as now; that is what specialists are for. But the decision is then reviewed by a jury of citizens, selected at random, given access to the file and to independent expertise, and empowered to send the decision back or to refer it for investigation. The jury does not need to be able to design the plant. It needs to be able to notice that the contract went to the minister's brother-in-law, that the specification was written so that only one bidder could meet it, or that the expert consulted was paid by the supplier.

Those are not technical judgements. They are the judgements juries already make in courtrooms, about matters far outside their expertise, every day.

One Vote Buys the Whole System

The decision to install such a system is a single decision at the highest level. It is exactly the kind of question the public is motivated to answer, because it is about whether the public is being robbed, and everybody has an opinion on that.

So the structure is: one national vote establishes the inspection mechanism, and the mechanism then reaches into every technical decision that follows. The public never has to read a procurement file. It has to decide, once, that procurement files will be read by people who do not work for the procurer.

The same applies to every government decision below the highest level. A contract to be filled by a private company is decided by an official and inspected by a jury. A regulatory exemption is granted by an agency and inspected by a jury. A land-use change is approved by a committee and inspected by a jury. In each case the decision-maker keeps the expertise and loses the impunity.

Why This Straightens the System

The reason technical decisions go wrong is rarely a lack of technical competence. The engineers generally know how to build the plant. Technical decisions go wrong because the person making them answers to a hierarchy, and the hierarchy has interests that are not the public's.

Inspection changes the calculation without changing the competence. An official who knows that a random group of citizens will read the file, with an expert at their elbow who does not report to him, makes a different decision from one who knows the file will be read by his superior, who signed off on the pressure in the first place. Nothing needs to be prohibited. The decision only needs to be seen.

And this is why the two halves fit together. Direct democracy at the highest level supplies the will to install inspection, which a representative system will never supply, because the representatives are the ones being inspected. Inspection at every level below supplies the discipline that direct voting cannot, because voting on the technical layer is impossible.

The objection was that the public cannot vote on the water treatment plant. Agreed. The public can vote that somebody who does not work for the ministry gets to look at how the plant was bought. That vote is short, it is one question, and it is the one that would change the most.