(Pressure for social change tends to come from the young, voters skew old, so in practice many direct democracies tend to be very slow to adapt to widespread grassroots social change.)
Unless you have some sort of constitutional provisions protecting people from each other, 51% of your fellow citizens will trod all over the other 49%.
And you may or may not have noticed, but most citizens don't seem to take the time to be up on the pros and cons for each and every provision of each and every piece of legislation that are debated today on the floor of parliamentary bodies.
In other words: it might solve what economists call the "principal-agent problem", but at a (potentially very high) cost.
A person who should not necessarily be considered a political system theorist once declared that freedom and democracy are incompatible. This may or may not be true, and for those pushing for democracy, maybe freedom is a non-issue from the start, but I think it needs to be at least considered whenever pushes for "moar democracy" come around.
Thats why I said "kind of". Real direct democracy should have those 3 fatures:
-mandatory referendum each year (question added to referendum once enough votes have been gathered) - anyone avoiding taking a vote is fined.
-3 answers under each question - Yes, No and Not Voting (so people wont just cast votes for subjects they are not interested in)
-2/3rds votes needed to pass the vote (to avoid 51% vs 49% - votes that count are only yes or no votes, "Not Voting" is not included)
-Then once the system matures proper democracy should have vote strength system - lets say 3 stages. 1st stage gets 1 vote, 3rd stage gets 3 votes. Higher stage = less taxes and more votes. You work + do some community voluntary work + have no issues with criminal law = you are 3rd stage.
Hmm. Interesting. Democracy, but with something like super-majority rules.
I'd like to see a feature that allowed cooler heads to prevail over time (like the US Senate was originally designed for). How would you keep the passions of the moment from being inflamed enough to blow by your almost super-majority rules?
In the US, you'd have problems getting your stage concept past "disparate impact" studies, but since we're speaking in hypotheticals anyway - this seems very Jeffersonian. How do you get something like this past the people who would cry (rightly or not) that your stage-3 continues to favor the historically privileged?
Any citizen of 18 years or older who works, do community work and avoid criminal charges would be stage 3. If someone cant pass those 3 rules, then what value he will bring to society anyways? His vote should be penalized. Dont get me wrong, its not to favorite good people, its to penalize people that cant do good to society. Vote strength should be based on your involvement in society and helping the community. Alcoholic bum should not have same amount of voting power as doctor. Yet, system would not discriminate poor people, since the rules are easy to follow. Rich people as part of their community work could speak at schools, drivers help people pass driving tests and unskilled workers clean woods from wild dumping places. Simple system that would allow lower taxes since the government would need less resources for public work done.
I would see many people avoiding doing the 40 hours of mandatory public work per year, so that would release them from being strong majority and their passion/patriotism would be graded this way.
