On: Britain is the most corrupt country in the world?

[cstross]

Note that direct democracy has its own drawbacks: for example, in some cantons the franchise was only extended to women on February 7th, 1971: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/february/7/...

(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.)

[rmc → cstross]

> in some cantons the franchise was only extended to women on February 7th, 1971

It's worse than that. One small place didn't extend it till 1990.