10.2: Direct and Indirect Democracy

There is no one way of holding American elections. This is because the power to administer elections, even presidential ones, is reserved for the states under the Constitution. The national government imposes some basic guidelines to ensure elections are democratic and protect voting rights, but states determine registration requirements, design ballots, and count votes.

Some states practice direct democracy by allowing citizens to 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 practiced by some states is the referendum, in which a law or constitutional amendment passed by a state legislature is submitted to the people for their approval. A policy that fails to earn majority support in a referendum can be prevented from being enacted, or repealed if it is already in force.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 to choose policies on their behalf. Like the British system on which it was based, the American electoral system has a single-member district structure. Most individual elections produce 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, they are chosen in separate elections, each with only one winner.)

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

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