Direct Democracy vs. Representative Democracy: A Comparative Analysis, Exercises of Social Welfare

Download Direct Democracy vs. Representative Democracy: A Comparative Analysis and more Exercises Social Welfare in PDF only on Docsity!

Direct Democracy versus Representative Democracy

Dolors Berga and Bernardo Moreno UdG & UMA

February, 2019

Direct Democracy versus Representative Democracy

DeÖnition

Direct Democracy: A type of democracy in which the power to govern lies directly in the hands of the people rather than being exercised through their representatives.

DeÖnition

Representative democracy (also indirect democracy, representative republic, or psephocracy): A type of democracy founded on the principle of elected o¢ cials representing a group of people

Nearly all modern Western-style democracies are types of representative democracies; for example, the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy, Ireland is a parliamentary republic, and the United States is a federal republic.

Direct Democracy versus Representative Democracy:

Voting System

Both, in direct and representative democracy, citizens have to express their opinion/vote. Therefore, a voting system has to be used.

DeÖnition

A voting system consist of two components: the messages (the information/opinion asked to the citizens) and the procedure used to aggregate the messages sent by the voters in order to make a decision.

Direct Democracy versus Representative Democracy:

Voting System

Examples: Referendums: Standard Referendum: Messages are yes or not and the aggregation procedure is majority voting. On Thursday 23 June 2016 a UK-wide referendum was held on the issue of the United Kingdomís continuing membership of the European Union. This referendum resulted in a majority voting to leave the EU by 52% of voters as opposed to 48% of voters who voted to remain. The 1980 and 1995 referendums on the secession of QuÈbec. In 2011 British Columbia held yet another referendum against a newly imposed consumption tax.

Direct Democracy versus Representative Democracy:

Voting System

Messages: In Switzerland, for example, multiple choice referendums are common, in Sweden, in 1957 and in 1980, o§ered voters three options; in 1977, a referendum held in Australia to determine a new national anthem was held in which voters had four choices; in 1992, New Zealand held a Öve-option referendum on their electoral system; and in 1982, Guam had one of six options, with an additional blank option for anyone(s) wishing to (campaign and) vote for their own seventh option.

Aggregation procedure: Multiple choice referendum poses the question of how the result is to be determined. If no single option receives the support of an absolute majority (more than half) of voters resort can be made to the two-round system or the alternative vote. In 2018 the CitizensíAssembly considered referendums in Ireland, with 76% supporting allowing more than two options, and 52% favouring AV in such cases.

Direct Democracy versus Representative Democracy:

Voting System

Multiple choice referendum:

Other people regard a non-majoritarian methodology like the Borda count.

In the Swedish case, in both referendums the íwinningíoption was chosen by the Single Member Plurality ("Örst past the post") system. In other words, the winning option was deemed to be that supported by a plurality, rather than an absolute majority, of voters. Although California does not have deliberate multiple-choice referendums, it does have so many yes-or-no referendums at each Election Day that the Stateís Constitution provides a method for resolving conáicts when two or more inconsistent propositions are passed on the same day. This is a de facto form of approval votingó i.e. the proposition with the most "yes" votes prevails over the others to the extent of any conáict. Another voting system that could be used in multiple-choice referendum is the Condorcet rule.

DD versus RD: Social Welfare Functions

An aggregate preference through which to select alternatives.

Social Welfare Functions. In Chapter V of Social Choice and Individual Values, after proving his General Possibility Theorem, Kenneth Arrow restated this fundamental result in the following terms:îThe only methods of passing from individual tastes to social preferences which will be satisfactory and which will be deÖned for a wide range of sets of individual orderings are dictatorialî.

DD versus RD: The Theory of Similarity: Social Choice

Functions

Directly as choices of one or several alternatives.

Social Choice Functions. Through the work of Gibbard (1973) and Satterthwaite (1975), the analysis of social choice functions was proven to be the most appropriate formalism to discuss strategic issues. They show that the only methods of choosing one alternative out of at least three alternatives which will be satisfactory and which will be deÖned for a wide range of sets of individual orderings are dictatorial

DD versus RD: The Theory of Similarity

Also in the case that Arrow calls the idealist position, where all agents share the same view regarding what is correct, but di§er in the information they have. Then, it is su¢ cient to obtain positive results that the changes in the information of an agent that carry an improvement of some alternative, do not imply changes in the preferences of any other agent for that alternative in the opposite direction. Hence, we are confronting the possibility of strong disagreement among individuals when evaluating situations with some form of basic collective agreement.

DD versus RD: Majority Preference Relation

Majority voting seems a very natural social decision process:

Pairwise comparisons. The term "majority" simply means "more than half." As it relates to a vote, a majority vote is more than half of the votes cast. Condorcet domains are sets of linear orders with the property that, whenever the preferences of all voters belong to this set, the majority relation of any proÖle of preferences with an odd number of voters

is transitive and satisÖes all other conditions demanded by Arrowís impossibility theorem belongs to the Condorcet domain

Why Referendums Aren¥t as Democratic as They Seem

Voters must make their decisions with relatively little information, forcing them to rely on political messaging, which puts power in the hands of political elites rather than those of voters:

Barber‡ and NicolÛ (2019) have a paper in which some group of agents (called informed agents) have information regarding the alternatives, and this information a§ects the preferences of the voters over the alternatives. It is not clear if the informed agents have incentives to reveal the information truthfully.

Why Referendums Aren¥t as Democratic as They Seem

Even if voters do have information, it may be a complex policy choice that even experts might spend years struggling to understand them.

The voters follow the guidance of trusted authority Ögures or Öt the choice within a familiar narrative (ideological or beliefs). Voters may also cope with complex issues driven by their emotions.

Sometimes governments organize referendum in order to avoid being accountable for unpopular decisions, or to have legitimacy to implement them.

Dissatisfaction of the Electorate with the Performance of

Elected Representatives

Several empirical works are noteworthy in the Öeld of the use of direct democracy as an instrument of control against the actions of elected politicians.

Frey (1994) and Matsusaka (2010) shows that in those American states where direct democracy is available, it is more likely that the preferred policy by most of the citizens is chosen.

Feld and Kirchg‰ssner (2001) found evidence that enlarging the power of the people using direct democratic procedures is a more promising way to reduce public debt than employing special procedural rules within the government.

Dissatisfaction of the Electorate with the Performance of

Elected Representatives

Sanz (2015) discovers that direct democracy leads to a reduction in public spending due to the fact that citizens are able to enforce lower spending on special interests. Besley and Coate (2008) provide a model that demonstrates that referendums and initiatives by citizens are useful to avoid that the political results on speciÖc issues end up di§ering excessively from what the majority desire, as a consequence of the possible aggregation of themes implied by the representative democracy. If there exits potential representative having a preference relation resembling the social one but such a person is not running as a candidate we have that the elected candidate can be far from representing the society.