Indeed. The proposition system is the cause of a lot of people's complaints about California's over-regulation. Direct democracy sounds good in practice, but these days pretty much every proposition is written by a special interest group who just want to protect their special interest.
> direct democracy sounds good in practice, but these days pretty much every proposition is written by a special interest group
I think a key part of direct democracy is to make it as local as possible. It's my understanding that Switzerland has cantons averaging 350k people that have their own constitutions, taxes, schools, health care, even treaties with other countries. These are often further divided into municipalities. People might be able to vote on things several times a year. People can vote to cancel laws they don't like. Lots more info here [0]
California has almost 40 million people. That might be too big to qualify as "direct"
