I do not make a secret from the fact that I am a supporter of direct democracy and that until now only Switzerland has actually succeeded to implement it. However Switzerland is a small country as geographic area and population 41,285 km2 and 8,000,000 inhabitants. It is also a rich country with educated people. It had a GDP of 635.65 billion US dollars and a GDP per capita of 47,817 US dollars in 2011. In the Eurozone it corresponds to 13,076 billion US dollars and a GDP per capita of 35,393 US dollars in 2011. The population of Eurozone is of 332,839,084 inhabitants.
I remind you that Switzerland is not member of the Eurozone and the figures above are just used to give a measure of the wealth (the difference is in fact not so big). Ordinary citizens of Switzerland may propose changes to the constitution ("initiative"), if they can find a number of supporters (100,000 out of about 3,500,000 voters). Parliament will discuss it, probably propose an alternative and afterwards all citizens may decide in a referendum whether to accept the initiative, the alternate proposal or stay without change.
Many people can think that direct democracy is expensive measured in time and in money, and I would agree, but I still assert that it can be worth. The internet technology makes elections less expensive; since one can declare the taxes on internet, it must be possible to also vote on internet in all the relevant questions. Once the system is in place and the fixed costs are paid, it will become less expensive to have it. Moreover the direct democracy requires a high level of protection of the right to be informed and of the transparency of the public administration.
But as I told you Switzerland is a small country, 44% of the population are voters. Any vote weights 1/3,500,000, which seems almost insignificant but it still counts more than 1/146,152,000, which would be the approximate weight of one vote at the Eurozone level.
In big countries citizens are aware that the individual vote has a little weight. It's important of course politically especially because absenteeism is phenomenon that must worry us. Absenteeism is the syndrome of a sick democracy.
First I affirm that the individual political right to vote has different weight depending on the total number of voters in the electoral jurisdiction. Secondly I say that a non-expressed vote weights more as well and the negative signals are maybe treated more seriously therefore.
My conclusion from this superficial review is that big countries need to make more efforts to combat absenteeism and maintain democracy. Personally I think that due to the fact that the general level of education is higher today than ever before, the system should allow more flexibility.
I give you just a theoretical example. The voters have to choose between X and Y. Fine! But many of the voters know that X and Y have the same opinion in several issues and this opinion is different from their own. This type of political opinion is completely annulled by the system construction. What you as a voter would like to say is e.g. 'stop the war', 'save the grizzly bear', 'equal pay' and have an actual possibility to obtain a say in questions that actually interests you. To hold a weight of 3,E-07 is anyway different than 3,E-09. Would you say that it may have significance? I challenge you to think democracy in mathematical terms and maybe we can find new ideas there.
So far for any human mind, there is no easy or accurate mathematical search method for optimal solution for voting problems formulation, perhaps a predictive mathematical method may be easy to formulate.. So Colleagues Mathematicians let's have it!
Swiss has (had?) specific regim not because it is small but because it is (was?) the bank of Europe.
"Had, was" because now the availability to have bank account in Swiss is strongly restricted. So, we will see how works real direct democraty in Swiss.
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