Three Conditions Decide Whether Direct Democracy Can Take Root

I argue for direct democracy often enough that I owe an honest account of where it would not work. Not every society is ready for it, and pretending otherwise discredits the case. Three conditions seem to me decisive, and a country that fails any of them should not attempt it yet.

The Media Must Be Decentralised

Direct democracy is a system in which the public decides the large questions. That is only as good as what the public knows, and what the public knows comes through the media.

The more decentralised the media, the better the chance direct democracy has; the more concentrated, the worse. A country with three television channels owned by two families is a country in which two families set the terms of every referendum. Direct voting in that country does not transfer power from the representatives to the public. It transfers power from the representatives to the owners of the channels, who were already the more powerful party.

This is a real and current danger, and I do not want to wave it away. The remedy is not to postpone direct democracy until the media is perfect; the media is never perfect. The remedy is to notice that the internet has already decentralised information more than any previous technology, that the fragmentation everyone complains about is, for this purpose, a precondition, and that the question in each country is whether enough of the public gets its information from enough independent sources that no single owner can set the outcome.

Where that is not yet true, direct democracy would be captured, and a captured direct democracy is worse than an honest representative one, because it wears the public's face.

The Citizens Must Have a Sense of Individuality

The second condition is psychological, and it is the one people are least comfortable discussing.

Direct democracy asks each citizen to form a view and vote it. That requires a certain relationship to authority: the belief that your own judgement on a public question is legitimate, that you are entitled to disagree with the minister and the professor and the priest, and that the disagreement is not insolence.

A population educated under a strongly authoritarian regime does not have this relationship to authority, and cannot be expected to acquire it overnight. Such a population has been trained, often for generations, to regard the ruler's view as the correct one and its own as presumptuous. Hand it a ballot on a substantive question and it will look for the authority to tell it how to vote, and some authority will oblige.

Asking such a population to jump straight to direct democracy is asking too much of it. That is not contempt; it is the same observation we make about any skill that has to be learned. Representative democracy, for all its faults, is a training ground in this respect. It teaches people that governments can be criticised and replaced, and a generation or two of that changes the relationship to authority in a way that makes the next step possible.

I hold this view with some discomfort, because it can be used as an excuse to deny people a say indefinitely. The test is whether the excuse is being used by the people who benefit from the delay. If the ones saying "not yet" are the ones currently in power, the argument should be discounted heavily.

The Military Must Be House-Trained

The third condition is the bluntest.

Every existing institution has an interest in existing. The largest and most dangerous of them is the military, because it has the means to defend the institutions it is used to serving, and a change of political system is exactly the kind of event that provokes it.

Before a move to direct democracy, the military must already be, in the plain sense, house-broken: accustomed to civilian control, without a tradition of intervention, and without a leadership that regards itself as the guardian of the constitution against the population. A military that has intervened in politics within living memory will read a transfer of decision-making to the public as a threat to the order it protects, and will act as an organisation to defend that order.

This is not a hypothetical. Every transition between forms of government in history has had to answer the question of what the army would do, and the ones that did not answer it well did not survive. Direct democracy is a transition like any other and it inherits the problem.

Where This Leaves the Argument

Three conditions: information not controlled by a few owners, a population that regards its own judgement as legitimate, and an army that takes orders. Countries that meet all three exist, and they are the ones where the argument for direct democracy should be pressed hardest. Countries that meet none should not try, and anyone urging them to is not doing them a favour.

But notice what the conditions have in common. Each is something a society can move toward, and each is worth moving toward regardless of what it is for. Decentralised media, self-respecting citizens and a subordinate military are good things on any theory of government. The case for direct democracy does not require pretending every society is ready. It requires saying which are, and what the others would have to become.