Not the utopia its advocates are claiming
Last March, Italy enacted a referendum on constitutional changes to its judicial branch of government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Italian_constitutional_referendum
My understanding of the wiki article and a related Medium article is the “Law Society of Italy” was recommending these reforms.
As I was reading the details of this referendum, they seemed complex. Because I don’t follow Italian politics or society, I don’t have enough background to comment wisely. But I also thought the suggested reforms were too complex for the common Italian citizens to understand as well. After all, most Italians are not lawyers.
The political parties were divided on this issue. I suspect some Italians were swayed by what their favorite political party told them to vote. Others citizens were swayed by the advertising money. Others were swayed by a commentator on TV or the internet. I suspect only a few citizens conducted an in-depth, independent analysis, looking at different perspectives, before coming to their own conclusion.
And Italy is known for its mafia. I wonder what part it played in this referendum.
Fifty-nine percent of eligible voters voted.
Forty-six percent voted “yes.”
Fifty-four percent voted “no.”
The constitutional changes were not implemented.
My Recent Encounter with Direct Democracy
About a year ago, I joined a Worpress political science discussion group. One member found my “no political parties” ad on Mastodon and invited me in:
The group consisted of political scientists who were advocating for more direct democracy in our lives. They argued that referenda are the better way to make laws than representative democracy. Let citizens make the laws, not the politicians. I wrote a short article on my experience with this experience.
This article did not get into details of why I do not see direct democracy as a viable system. I promised them I would write a more comprehensive article of the perils of direct democracy. So here is that article.
Big Money
As alluded in the previous section, the results of referenda can be influenced by big money, just like representative democracy is today. In a close referendum, the side with the greater budget or the better marketing team will win. Should these be the deciding factors?
Nuance of Legislation
Current parliamentary rules provide opportunity for bills to be challenged, scrutinized, and amended. Parliamentary committees, opposition parties, the media, stakeholders, and public opinion can try to influence the outcome of the bill before it becomes law.
Technically, the drafters of referenda, if they want their referendum to succeed, should consider their wording carefully. However, their process is less nuanced than the processes of traditional legislatures. The drafters can easily miss important perspectives. This not only reduces the chance of the referendum passing (waste of societal resources), it can cause more problems than it solves if the referendum does pass.
Competing Legislation
Successful referenda are more likely to create legislation that conflicts with other legislation. See above section.
This leaves the civil service to decide which legislation is more relevant and applied to the situation.
Rescinding Legislation
If a parliament-derived legislation is found not to work out well, it can be rescinded by another bill. Yes, this rescission is still cumbersome for shepherding any bill into law is not easy.
Truth be told, rescinding of ineffective legislation does not happen as often as it should. Our legislative processes matured in the 19th century. We are in the 21st century, and our world is much more complicated. Our parliaments are already working too slow. So with parliament-derived legislation, the civil service can decide to ignore the ineffective legislation — and our too-busy politicians usually go along because rescinding ineffective legislation is mundane work.
But if a referendum-derived legislation is found not to work out so well, it should, legally speaking, be rescinded by another referendum. Setting up and shepherding a counter referendum will be more difficult than setting up and shepherding a rescission bill for parliament.
If the civil service decides to ignore ineffective referendum-derived legislation, that will be construed as going against the will of the people. The citizens who voted for the referendum will see less credibility in governance. And that brings an unnecessary festering of citizen discontent.
Citizen Expertise
Advocates of referendum assume the citizens are competent enough to handle the complex issues facing society. Maybe better said is that the citizens are almost as competent as the people elected in representative democracies.
With representative democracy, politicians often temper their hard, inflexible opinions when confronted with new facts and perspectives. On the other hand, citizens can keep their hard opinions when voting “yes” or “no.”
In my opinion, Italian citizens did not have the background to properly evaluate what was on their March referendum. If there was to be a referendum on this topic, it should have been conducted within the recognized law society of Italy. If the law society approved, then the Italian parliament should have put the referendum contents into a bill and shepherded that bill into law.
Multiple Referenda on the Ballot
Advocates of referenda would like referenda on many more issues. Can you imagine an election with five to 10 referendum questions? How about 20 to 50?
Many political junkies would like this. They would happily study each resolution, decide whether to cast “yes” or “no” on each, put their yes/no list together, than march into their polling station to put their preferences on their ballot.
But many citizens are not political junkies. Many would find a 10-question ballot annoying. They want our voting to be simple. If the ballot has more than five resolutions on it, many voters will start tuning out. They may cast an X without much thought. Or they may not bother voting, especially with all the confusing advertising, which might be designed to discourage certain voters not to vote. As much as the referenda advocates want these citizens to participate at a higher level of democracy, these citizens will not want this higher level.
A ballot that is too long will disenfranchise much of the citizenry. Political scientists use the term "voter fatigue."
The Swiss Cantons
The political science group would often refer to the local canton model of governance in Switzerland. Sometimes they would post pictures of citizens in open-air forums in Swiss villages, giving the impression of citizen participation in governance. When I questioned the group about the level of participation in these forums, they said “20% at best.”
This was not surprising to me. Many of us do not have occupations or lifestyles that allow us to participate when the local councils meet. Many of us do not have the interest to sit through such meetings, especially with their rules of procedure and vote-counts. In essence, this part of Swiss democracy is a self-selected assembly, when people have made a choice to participate or not. But for those who did not attend, it does not feel like democracy to them.
As the Swiss model of governance moves from villages to cantons (provinces) to federation, it becomes more like a representative democracy. While the Swiss do have more referenda than other nations, most of its affairs are decided with its legislatures, composed of political parties and representatives.
So while the Swiss village model is wistfully observed by some political thinkers, its higher levels of governance are not that much different than other western democracies.
Other Direct Democracies
In the previous section, I mentioned the self-selected assembly. It is a popular suggestion for improving democracy. This means that those citizens who want to attend the meeting have the right to vote. These voices, in effect, can drown out the voices who do not show up. Great for people who show up.
I like to bring this political story I heard years ago. A 1000-person society has introduced a formal bill. Each citizen will be taxed $1, and 10 citizens will be each given $100. Who has more interest in showing up at that meeting? Self-selected assemblies will work like this.
Another suggestion that seems to be gaining more attention is “lottocratic” or “sortition.” This feature has citizens being selected at random to participate in certain decisions. For example, jury duty in Canada and the USA is somewhat random process to decide on the decision makers in the trial.
One drawback on sortition is that more than a few citizens have a fixed mindset. If they are chosen, they will bring that mindset into a decision-making body. If they are in a minority, they will stall the process and keep stalling until until they get their way. Other decision makers will resign out of frustration. For collective decision making to work, we do need mechanisms that put people who can at least listen to other points of view into these bodies. Sortition is not a solution I want to try out.
One of my favorite ideas on direct democracy is Dynamic Recovery Proxy (DRP). With this internet-based system, political junkies can watch the daily happenings in their legislatures — and move their vote to the legislators who are in line with the citizen’s thinking just before the legislative vote is taken. After the vote is taken, a political junkie can move his/her vote to another legislator for the next vote. I suspect most citizens under DRP would just park their vote with a preferred legislator and leave it there for a long time. But some political junkies would be happy to move their proxy from legislator to legislator on a frequent basis.
Representative Democracy
Representative democracy is failing. Let’s not soft-pedal this trend. But we need to understand why.
In my opinion, its main flaw is that politicians need the machine of a political party to become elected. For that service, the politician’s first loyalty is to the political party. The more distant loyalties are the residents of the politician’s electoral district, the actual voters for the politician, the promises made on the campaign trail, and society-at-large. There is a significant estrangement between the people and their government.
It’s not hard to understand why some people are looking for a solution. Direct democracy seems to be a credible solution. If the politicians are not guiding us in a rightful way, why not just let the citizens make the decisions, rightly or wrongly, directly?
I hope this essay shows that direct democracy has some serious issues. There are good reasons why Switzerland has not become a full-fledged direct democracy.
Tiered Democratic Governance
I am offering a different version of representative democracy. Tiered Democratic Governance (TDG) has these features: 1) No political parties, 2) Voting based on good character and capacity for governance, 3) a culture of consultative decision making, and 4) an advisory board to guide the elected TDG institutions to make better decisions. More details are available on the TDG website.
I make no claim that the TDG will be an instant fix. In fact, I often state that we need to learn some new humanistic skills to make the TDG work. It will take about 20 years for these skills to become normalized in the new TDG political culture.
Here’s the ironic part. When TDG governance has had a few decades of actual governance, society will change for the better. Citizens will have more free time. They will be more service oriented, volunteering their time to their society. They will be better educated, especially about realizing that their personal knowledge is limited. All these attributes will mean that direct democracy would then be functional as well. It is conceivable that a TDG society could be a stepping stone for a future direct democracy. We may not need representatives anymore.
Conclusion
The referendum in Italy in March 2026 shows some of the flaws of direct democracy.
While the Swiss model seems to be a utopia, it has neither scaled up nor been exported to other parts of the world.
Tiered Democratic Governance will require new humanistic skills. These skills will be necessary for a well-functioning direct democracy.
So the TDG could lead into that direct democracy — a few decades later.
Published on Medium 2026
Psychology of a Political Party
The TDG Neighborhood Representative
