^^^^^^
w3rd
voting is not just a right, it is a civic responsibility.
good article on direct democracy, and I certainly agree with the concluding statement:
| quote: | Greenbacks and ham
California puts direct democracy to the test
By Kate Julian, Boston Sunday Globe 9/7/2003
(http://www.boston.com/news/globe/id...nbacks_and_ham/)
WITH A MASSIVE BUDGET shortfall and a crippling unemployment rate, California was in crisis. Enter a pair of Hollywood publicist brothers and erstwhile promoters of a hair rinse called Grey Gone. With one brother convicted of mail fraud following the revelation that Grey Gone might better be called Hair Gone, the duo turned their creative energies to promoting a ballot initiative promising unemployed Californians over 50 a weekly $30 voucher.
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Armed with substantial donations from would-be pensioners, the brothers effectively blanketed California with advertisements touting their outlandish plan, otherwise known as ``Ham and Eggs.'' Though a fierce campaign coordinated by the California State Chamber of Commerce defeated the measure, its proponents returned to the ballot box, only to fail again. In frustration, disgruntled Ham and Eggers launched three separate unsuccessful recall drives against Governor Culbert L. Olson.
For sheer spectacle, the turmoil now unfolding in California may be a worthy heir to the Ham and Eggs campaigns that dominated California politics in the late 1930s. But to dismiss such episodes as comedy is to miss a larger question. Today, some 24 ``direct-democracy'' states, most of them in the West, allow voters to circumvent their elected leaders by drafting and adopting initiatives. Most of these states also have referenda, and 11 of them allow citizens to recall elected statewide officials (as do seven additional states).
Are such exercises in direct democracy a panacea for political alienation and declining voter participation? Or a chimera that allows well-funded interests to hijack legitimate democratic processes? A small but growing cohort of political scientists are attempting to answer these questions with hard evidence, and in California they've found an undeniably importantif idiosyncraticlaboratory.
. . .
In 1911, progressive reformers shepherded the recall, the referendum, and the initiative into state law. Not that everyone was happy about it. ``California's bastard triplets . . . are weapons put into the hands of the ignorant, the discontented, and the irresponsible by which the peace, harmony and good order of the community are disturbed,'' wrote Santa Barbara's city attorney the following year. By 1930, voters had considered 70 initiatives on a dizzying range of topics from prizefighting to Prohibition to interest rates, though fewer than 20 passed.
For critics of California-style direct democracy, the initiative is responsible for everything from failing schools to fiscal chaos across the country. (Of the many states now facing serious budget crises, the most serious shortfalls are mainly found in direct-democracy states.) In his influential 1998 book ``Paradise Lost,'' the California political journalist Peter Schrag traced California's decline from symbol of opportunity to a decrepit state with a crumbling infrastructure. He pinned the blame on 1978's property tax-cutting Proposition 13 and the direct-democracy flood it created. Over the next 25 years, Californians would approve more than 50 initiatives -- compared with fewer than 10 in the previous quarter-century.
Many of these initiatives gave precise spending directions. In 1988, voters passed Proposition 98, which dictated that the state set aside at least 40 percent of its general fund for education. Proposition 117, passed in 1990, earmarked tobacco tax proceeds for the protection of mountain lion habitats. But the new initiatives also put in place institutional restraints -- from term limits to supermajority requirements to limits on legislative staffing -- that hindered government's ability to efficiently carry out these directives. The entire process, Schrag lamented, was rife with chaos and contradiction.
And then there was the role of money. Progressive-era advocates hoped that direct democracy would counter what they saw as money's corruptive effects on the political system. But from the beginning, the process has been infused with enormous sums. In 1936, chain retailers successfully spent some $1.1 million on polling and advertising that urged a ``no'' vote on the Chain Store Tax Referendum. By the beginning of World War II, the state had its own initiative industry that handled every part of the process, from signature-gathering to strategic polling to advertising. This groundbreaking work paved the way for the national campaign consulting industry that would emerge in decades to come.
. . .
Political scientists like to talk about what one scholar calls ``the populist paradox'': Have direct-democracy mechanisms, meant to reduce the influence of money on the political system, in fact had the opposite effect? This critique joins several other longer-standing objections to direct democracy: that the average voter is not competent to make complicated policy decisions; that voters are more likely than legislators to abuse the interests of minorities; and that the process severely hobbles the government's ability to manage its affairs effectively.
Until the early 1990s, when a group of quantitatively trained young political scientists set out to specialize in direct democracy, there was little empirical evidence to prove or disprove these points. So far, their research has tended to redeem direct democracy's reputation -- at least partially.
Elisabeth R. Gerber of the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy notes that voters are not fools: They cast votes that are remarkably consistent with their underlying preferences, as indicated by polling data and other demographic attributes. Shaun Bowler, a professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside, concurs. ``We've got a whole checklist of things that say initiatives aren't nearly as bad as people think,'' he says.
For instance, claims Bowler, one would think that people who have children in private schools would consistently support vouchersand they do. Gerber and Bowler agree that voters make rational decisions even on the most complicated ballot initiatives and even in the face of deliberately deceptive advertising. In 1988, confronted with five competing, highly technical auto insurance reform measures, three of which were backed by insurance companies, California voters selected one of the two backed by actual reform groupseven though, by one estimate, that measure's supporters spent about 62 cents per vote, compared with the almost $24 per vote the insurance industry spent on its best-funded initiative.
Insofar as spending does affect the outcome of initiative campaigns, scholars say, it is overwhelmingly on the ``no'' side. Given enough money, it is possible to block a measure from passing but not to buy a ``yes'' vote.
These researchers also emphasize the positive consequences of the initiative process. They've found that state policy on at least some subjects -- abortion, the death penalty, and taxation -- seems to more closely match voter preference in initiative states than in non-initiative states. The initiative may also have beneficial effects on the citizenry itself. Daniel A. Smith, an associate professor of political science at the University of Florida, notes that voters in direct-democracy states have higher levels of turnout, are more knowledgeable about national politics, and donate more money to interest groups.
. . .
If California has come to represent what can go wrong with broad-based direct democracy, it may also represent what can go right. The state's acute fiscal crisis can be attributed in part to shortsighted, self-interested, and conflicting ballot measures. On the other hand, a spectacular 89 percent of likely California voters say they are following the current recall effort ``very closely'' or ``fairly closely,'' according to a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Short of doing away with California's initiative, myriad reforms have been proposed, from making information about the financing of initiatives public to capping the number of measures that can appear on a ballot. Still, any such changes would have to be made -- yes -- by yet another initiative.
Benjamin R. Barber, a political theorist at the University of Maryland, warns against those who would ridicule California's recall. ``Frankly, even a screwed-up recall system, a referendum system that sometimes has outcomes that don't look so rational, is to me far preferable to some self-appointed policy elite that thinks it knows what the right questions are. . .. I prefer a recall in that over time it may teach democracy.'' He adds: ``When all is said and done, democracy is the right of the people to make their own mistakes.''
Kate Julian is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.
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PS Calvin and Hobbes is tha shiznit
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