10.1: Direct and Indirect Democracy

The first thing to note about American elections is that there is no one way of holding them. Administering elections, even presidential elections, is a power reserved for the states under the Constitution. The national government imposes some basic guidelines (for example, all elections must be democratic, and Americans’ voting rights must be respected), but state governments determine registration requirements, design ballots, and count votes, among other tasks. As with other reserved powers, the placing of these responsibilities in the hands of the states leads to state-by-state variation in how elections work.

Some states allow their citizens to participate in direct democracy. In certain states, citizens can propose a law or an amendment to the state constitution as an initiative. If an initiative gathers enough signatures on a petition, it is placed on the ballot to be voted on by all citizens and enacted if it receives majority support. Another form of direct democracy is the referendum, in which a law or constitutional amendment passed by a state legislature is submitted to the people for their approval, either automatically or if enough citizens request it. A policy that fails to earn majority support in a referendum can be prevented from being enacted, or repealed if it is already in force.

Initiatives and referenda are relatively rare, even in states that allow them. Most American elections are examples of indirect democracy, in which citizens vote for someone — a legislator, an executive, occasionally a judge — to choose policies on their behalf. Like the British parliamentary system on which it was based, the American electoral system has a single-member district structure: most individual elections produce produces a single winner who represents a particular area, such as a state, a congressional district, a county, or a city ward. (This is true even for the Senate: although each state has two senators in Congress, they are chosen in separate elections, and each Senate election has only one winner.)

Compared to direct democracy, indirect democracy has many advantages. Governments must make a multitude of decisions in order to function, and putting each of those decisions up for a public vote would be hugely inefficient. Even if it could be done efficiently, the choices governments face involve complex issues of economics, science, organizational theory, diplomacy, and even warfare — issues which average citizens might struggle to comprehend. Consequently, we assign politicians to make political decisions for us for the same reason we assign doctors to make medical decisions for us: it makes sense to entrust such important matters to full-time experts.

Of course, representative democracy can only be as good as the representatives themselves. If we the people elect incompetent or corrupt politicians who fail to pursue the public interest, the results might be even worse than if we had tried to decide every policy question ourselves. Politicians’ desire for reelection may prevent them from neglecting their constituents’ interests completely, but for this mechanism to work voters must be sufficiently attentive to politicians’ actions and both willing and able to hold them accountable for their misdeeds.