Direct Democracy

Direct democracy is usually offered as the cure for representative democracy, and Marsh treats it as the same disease without the intermediary. Where a majority rules there is no need for compromise, so a minority simply goes unrepresented, which produces governance by the majority rather than governance by the people. As in every system where groups hold the highest power, individual rights are at risk by construction. The specific failure is about weight. Direct democracy gives equal weight to all votes, the expert and the novice, the completely dependent and the entirely unaffected, so expert opinion is overshadowed by volume and the decisions are worse for it. Allowing votes from people unaffected by the issue produces not only uninformed decisions but active persecution of minorities, since a majority with nothing at stake can impose costs it will never bear. Both problems are the same problem seen twice. Voting attaches decision-making power to numbers rather than to knowledge or to exposure. Her alternative addresses each half separately. User groups fix who has standing to decide, since a user group is everyone affected by an action and nobody who is not. Concentric circles fix the weight of expertise, since peer promotion amplifies knowledge without giving it any authority to command.

Tyranny of the majority is an old worry, named by Tocqueville and developed by John Stuart Mill, and constitutional design has answered it with entrenched rights, supermajority requirements and judicial review. Advocates of direct democracy point to Swiss cantonal practice, to citizens' initiatives and to liquid democracy schemes such as those trialled by Pirate Parties, in which votes can be delegated to trusted proxies on particular topics. Liquid democracy is the nearest existing attempt at Marsh's problem, since delegation is a way of weighting expertise, but it still resolves into a count. Her position is that no arrangement of votes fixes the underlying mistake, because the fault is in deciding by number rather than by who is affected and who knows.