California offers a warning to voters all over the
world
The
Economist Apr 20th 2011 | from the print edition – 674 words
CALIFORNIA is once again
nearing the end of its fiscal year with a huge budget hole and no hope of a
deal to plug it, as its constitution requires. Other American states also have
problems, thanks to the struggling economy. But California cannot pass timely
budgets even in good years, which is one reason why its credit rating has, in
one generation, fallen from one of the best to the absolute worst among the 50
states. How can a place which has so much going for it—from its diversity and
natural beauty to its unsurpassed talent clusters in Silicon Valley and
Hollywood—be so poorly governed?
It is tempting to accuse those
doing the governing. The legislators, hyperpartisan and usually deadlocked, are
a pretty rum bunch. The governor, Jerry Brown, who also led the state between
1975 and 1983, has (like his predecessors) struggled to make the executive
branch work. But the main culprit has been direct democracy: recalls, in which
Californians fire elected officials in mid-term; referendums, in which they can
reject acts of their legislature; and especially initiatives, in which the
voters write their own rules. Since 1978, when Proposition 13 lowered
property-tax rates, hundreds of initiatives have been approved on subjects from
education to the regulation of chicken coops.
This citizen legislature has
caused chaos. Many initiatives have either limited taxes or mandated spending,
making it even harder to balance the budget. Some are so ill-thought-out that
they achieve the opposite of their intent: for all its small-government
pretensions, Proposition 13 ended up centralising California’s finances,
shifting them from local to state government. Rather than being the curb on
elites that they were supposed to be, ballot initiatives have become a tool of
special interests, with lobbyists and extremists bankrolling laws that are
often bewildering in their complexity and obscure in their ramifications.
They paved paradise and
put up a voting booth
This has been a tragedy for
California, but it matters far beyond the state’s borders. Around half of
America’s states and an increasing number of countries have direct democracy in
some form. Next month Britain will have its first referendum for years (on
whether to change its voting system), and there is talk of voter recalls for
aberrant MPs. The European Union has just introduced the first supranational
initiative process. With technology making it ever easier to hold referendums
and Western voters ever more angry with their politicians, direct democracy
could be on the march.
And why not? There is, after
all, a successful model: in Switzerland direct democracy goes back to the
Middle Ages at the local level and to the 19th century at the federal. This
mixture of direct and representative democracy seems to work well. Indeed, in
some cases referendums are good things: they are a way of holding a legislature
to account. In California reforms to curb gerrymandering and non-partisan
primaries, both improvements, have recently been introduced by initiatives; and
they were pushed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a governor elected through the
recall process. But there is a strong case for proceeding with caution,
especially when it comes to allowing people to circumvent a legislature with
citizen-made legislation.
Proper democracy is far more
than a perpetual ballot process. It must include deliberation, mature
institutions and checks and balances such as those in the American
constitution. Ironically, California imported direct democracy almost a century
ago as a “safety valve” in case government should become corrupt. The process
began to malfunction only relatively recently.
All this provides both a hope
and a worry. The hope is that California can right itself. The worry is that
the Western world is slowly drifting in the opposite direction. Concern over
globalisation means government is unpopular and populism is on the rise.
Europeans may snigger at the bizarre mess those crazy Californians have voted
themselves into. But how many voters in Europe would resist the lure of a
ballot initiative against immigration? Or against mosque-building? Or lower
taxes? What has gone wrong in California could all too easily go wrong
elsewhere.
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