Let the People Rule

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

Hello, and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss and compare democratic institutions.

With John Matsusaka I discuss direct democracy, based on his latest book “Let the People Rule: How Direct Democracy Can Meet the Populist Challenge”, that he published with the Princeton University Press in 2020.

Many people feel disconnected from politics. Direct democracy is a powerful democratic institution that can reconnect people with political processes and give them actual political power. But it has to be used with great care. Together we discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of direct democracy, and – based on his extensive research – John provides insights and opinions on direct democracy in the US and in general. 

The book indeed provides not only a great overview of the historic origins of direct democracy in the US, but also suggestions to implement direct democracy at the federal level. Interestingly, the United States is one of very few countries that never had a popular vote at the national level. John suggests starting with advisory votes, and hence to start a process of small steps to implement direct democracy at the federal level.

Direct democracy is definitely here to stay. The question is how to use it in the best possible way rather than to cancel it as populist. Technology will bring another boost to direct democracy, carrying with it a lot of risks but also great opportunities. So the earlier we get to grips with this institution, the better for our societies.

John Matsusaka is Charles F. Sexton Chair in American Enterprise, Professor of Finance and Business Economics, and Executive Director of Initiative and Referendum Institute. An economist by training, he works on topics related to political economy, direct democracy, corporate finance, and corporate governance. His article “Ballot Order Effects in Direct Democracy Elections” received the Duncan Black Prize for best paper in Public Choice. He provides commentary for media outlets including ABC News, CNN, Fox News, NPR, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the twenty-eighth episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. I am always curious to hear your opinion, so just send me an email to [email protected], and please leave a review and share this episode with friends and colleagues. If you find my discussions interesting and you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog. 

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: John Matsusaka welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show.

John Matsusaka: Delighted to be here.

Stephan Kyburz: So as always my first question is what is your first memory of democracy?

John Matsusaka:  Well, you know that’s a funny question actually because I don’t have a first memory. That’s a question like asking me what’s my first memory of blue sky. It was always there. That was just what it was. What’s first memory of anything? It was always there. And maybe it’s this little bit of background. I grew up in the Seattle area, State of Washington. It was a very democratic area. It was generally clean, so there weren’t a lot of machine politicians there or something, so it wasn’t that people ever really kind of talked about it. It was just presumed that we always elected people and we always voted on laws. So it’s interesting. My more formative memories are instances of non-democracy strangely enough. And the one I’m thinking, your question made me think about was: you know I grew up in this very democratic state and city where we voted on everything. And I went to graduate school in Chicago and I was walking through the stacks of the library one day doing some research, back when people actually, you know, looked at the actual books on the shelves. And I was looking for one thing and right next to it I pulled another thing off the shelf, and it was this report from the state of New York about direct democracy from the 1970’s or something like that. And they were deciding whether they should have direct democracy in New York, which they don’t. And I started flipping through it and it was all about why the people shouldn’t be trusted and why it would ruin democracy in the state of New York if they let people vote on issues. And this was actually remarkable for me. This was one of my more formative memories because I hadn’t before thought that people out there would argue in this country, the United States, the people would argue oh democracy is a bad thing, we shouldn’t let people vote. This is dangerous. So I answer your question in reverse actually but in some sense some of my formative memories were just thinking about cases where people were challenging and didn’t think democracy we should be using.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s very interesting because I think trust is a very important topic, right? Especially in these days, in democracy. And it goes both ways right? Like the trust in the people to make good decisions and maybe we can come back to that point. But also the trust in the institutions. And you have written the book “Let the People Rule” and you have written it during the Trump presidency but already before you have done a lot of research on direct democracy. Can you maybe give us some motivation for you to write the book and a quick outline. What are kind of the main issues in the book?

John Matsusaka: You know it was published in 2020 but as you said I actually started writing it before, actually before Trump came in and before Brexit. But in a way those were perfect because those were exactly kind of crystallized all the things my book was about. But the book, the key idea of the book is that a lot of western democracies, particularly the United States, which is you know where I am and what most of the book is about, but not just about the United States, but western democracies are under a lot of stress right now. And you just mentioned trust. There’s a disturbing lack of confidence that democratic institutions are really representing the people, in some sense. This is not just a feeling we have now. This is something we can see in opinion surveys that are going back 70 years in the United States and there’s just been this gradual slow, chipping away at basic confidence and belief in the basic fairness of democratic institutions. So what the book is about is to say: why is this happening? Why are people, again over a long period of time, this is not Trump, this is not just some brand new thing but over decades, why are people losing confidence in the representativeness of their institutions? And once we understand that, what can we do about it? Just to give a really quick story of what the argument is, there are a lot of… Obviously there’s a lot of work that’s been done. A lot of people have argued about why people are so unhappy these days. I’m a little bit contrarian in that there’s a couple of views out there saying: well people don’t like globalization. People don’t like the way the economic base is changing and so, you know, blue collar workers don’t have jobs anymore and they’re frustrated about that. Or people don’t like immigrants coming to their communities. So there’s a lot of pointing at things which have happened in the last ten years or so. But if you really look at the opinion polls, it’s really clear that whatever’s been going on has been going on, you know, at least since the 1950’s. It’s been going on a long time. So you can’t really point to really recent things. What the really recent things which are real, are really… they’re kind of pricking or pricking a sword that’s already been festering a bit and what I argue in the book and try to demonstrate with a lot of evidence, some statistical, some historical. But what’s happened across western democracies is they’ve really changed the nature of the way they govern. From the way they used to a long time ago to the way they do now. And the really most fundamental change is that most laws in most advanced democracies right now are not made by elected officials. They’re made by, let’s call them bureaucrats. That’s a pejorative term but I don’t mean it that way. I just mean descriptively, you know, non-elected experts in agencies. And just most laws, in fact, the overwhelming preponderance of effective laws are made by these unelected officials now. And there’s a good reason we did that and that’s good for us that we’re using experts in our government decisions now. But the unanticipated and unexpected side effect of that is we’ve decoupled a lot of lawmaking from the people and I suggest that, at some sense, is a root of why people feel a loss of control. Because they know how to call up their local elected official and complain. They know how to kick them out of office if they’re not getting what they want. But they don’t know how to deal with some bureaucrat deeply embedded in some agency. They don’t know how to reach out to them. How to talk to them. How to persuade them. They don’t know how to change them. And so I suggest that a lot of our discontents can be root… They’re ultimately coming down to feelings of loss of control and the notion that some shadowy group is running the system. But I suggest that that’s really coming a lot out of the fact that there has been a loss of control. And we shouldn’t dismiss these kind of populous sentiments and say: oh these people are just scapegoating because they don’t like living in the 21st century. I think there’s a real thing going on in there, that ordinary people don’t know how to control the kind of governments we have right now. So that’s the basic analysis of the problem and then the book goes on to suggest that part of the solution is to give the people more control through direct democracy. So I won’t say anymore on that now because I know we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that. But it goes on to lay out how we might do that.

Stephan Kyburz: So I totally agree with the notion of control and that people want control. They feel they lost some of the control. Probably also as you mentioned in the book through globalization, technologies etc, etc… But I think also important to mention here is that representative democracy is one type of democracy and then we have direct democracy and I think we probably agree that in the best sense they would complement each other. And most countries use representative democracies and have developed those, but obviously also direct democratic tools can be a great instrument to have a check on representative democracies. And also the US has actually developed the representative and the direct democracies over time. Can you elaborate a bit historically, in the US, how that discussion around direct democracy evolved and what were kind of the key developments? Also you mentioned that the important progressive era when actually the discussion around direct democracy was quite intense but  died down in the first half of the 20th century. What are kind of historically the roots? And also the populist roots of direct democracy?

John Matsusaka: The US is somewhat schizophrenic in its approach to direct democracy. And maybe I should just define terms. When I mean representative democracy I mean what I think most people think is that ordinary voters go and pick people and those people they pick go make the laws. It’s your senator. It’s your president. It’s your MP or something like that. That’s representative democracy. When I talk about direct democracy I mean the people voting on the laws directly themselves. So Brexit would be an example of direct democracy in my use of the term or all the different initiatives that we see in California. So when I say the US is schizophrenic it’s because obviously the US is one of the world’s pioneers in democracy and the US has an incredibly rich history of using direct democracy at the state and local level, at the subnational level. So you can find even one state even when the country was being formed when the constitution was being adopted state by state. One state actually held a referendum to decide whether the state should go in. So this idea of voters actually voting on the core laws goes back from literally to the very beginning of the country. And it’s been used throughout the country at all levels for all this time. This schizophrenic part is that the US has 0 direct democracy at the national level or the federal level, whatever you want to call it. And that puts us in a very odd situation where we are one of maybe 3 or maybe 4 democracies in the world now that have never had a national vote on an issue. And that’s actually part of a big part of our problem, I would argue, is that all other countries routinely, not every day, but they routinely imagine in their democratic toolkit that they can ask the voters their opinion on an issue if they need to. Americans don’t even think of that as a possibility in their mindset. There’s different kinds of direct democracy and sometimes people get confused when they talk about it because they blur the different things in. The one that sometimes people mean is the initiative process and that’s a very famous one in California where in the initiative process the voters themselves can come up with the law that they want to vote on. So some citizen group writes up a proposed law, you know, I want to cut taxes. I want to legalize marijuana or I want to ban abortion or I want to allow abortion. Whatever it is. They come up with an idea and if they can collect enough signatures it goes to the ballot and then the citizens themselves can approve it or not. So that’s a particular type of direct democracy. But sometimes I think people think it’s the only type and it’s not. There’s a whole other type where the voters don’t come up with the idea but the politicians do. So Brexit is an example of that type. And then there’s kind of a third type which is the voters don’t come up with it, the politicians don’t come up with it, it’s just required if the politicians want to take an action. So an example would be in say California, if the state wants to borrow money the politicians can propose it but the voters have to prove it. Or in Switzerland in many cantons if the government wants to spend a new spending program they just automatically have to go to the voters. So that’s a third kind. So I just want to make sure that we, you know, when people think about this, is that it’s not just this super kind of supercharged thing of the initiative that we’re talking about here, where those citizens come up with the laws themselves. But there’s also other forms where there’s automatic triggers for tax increases or the government uses it and calls a vote. The key thing is the people actually getting to vote on laws.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. And I also feel that these two instruments like the initiative and the referendum, at least from a swiss perspective, have been used very successfully and also we can really mention that the people are actually, that are using those instruments, are very much in favor of the instruments. And also you mentioned in the book that in a 2017 study like 2/3rds of people see direct democracy as a legitimate or a useful tool and they would like to use direct democracy. Also you say a majority of all states, actually, would favor direct democracy. So why do you think that schizophrenia that you said emerged in the US? That you have in some states so much direct democracy, some people even say maybe it’s too much, that people have to vote too many times. But then at the national level there is nothing at all. Where does that come from? This discrepancy.

John Matsusaka: Before I answer that, you said something and I just want to make sure that it’s clear what that is. You talked about polling data and I want to make sure it’s clear because I think it’s just, it’s amazing. But there’s I think it was a year ago, perhaps, they went out and did surveys of something like 30 countries across the world. And this is on all continents. And some of them are democracies, some are not. I think Vietnam was in there, you know there’s Egypt perhaps, but essentially everywhere, every country in the world they went into, there was a majority that said, do you think the people ought to vote on important national issues. And I believe it was every country in the world there was a majority and it hovered in most countries, it was about ⅔ or more of the people said yes, the people should vote on issues. That’s just remarkable that it’s such a common, it’s almost like baked into the human nature. People think they ought to vote on things that affect their lives. So I just wanted to underscore that. And that gets to the, of course, the problem. That’s especially true in the United States but what we don’t ever get a vote on anything here at the national level. So why is that? Well, it basically has to do with the fact that we’re a victim of our own ancientness in some sense. So the United States became a democracy back in the time when it was a democracy in general was a weird thing. If you looked around the world it was Kings everywhere right? We’re talking about the late 1700’s. And the notion that, oh you’re going to let people actually choose their rulers? That’s not gonna work. You guys are insane. The founders pushed the envelope quite far and said we’re going to try this deal and we’re going to actually pick our rulers. You guys have all these kings and hereditary stuff or whatever you’re doing, we’re gonna actually let people pick our own rulers. And people said, well you know this is crazy. It’s going to fail. And it worked nevertheless. But the thing is that the idea of letting people actually vote on laws, they were already so radical it would have been… It’s kind of unimaginable to think they would have even considered that idea at the time. So they did something that was pretty radical for 1787. The problem is as the time went by and we realized: oh you know people actually can govern themselves, actually they can choose their own leaders. As that happened other places around the world started to become… they took the ball and then they kept running, to use an analogy and they started to innovate and use more and more direct democracy. But it’s almost impossible to amend the US constitution. So it would take a constitutional amendment to actually do something high powered like an initiative. And so first of all, it’s really hard to bring in those legal structures. The other thing is that the country’s a little bit of a victim of its own success. So I think people reasonably say: hey this has worked pretty good. Why do we need to change it? And so there’s a little bit of that deeply conservative attitude that says you know we’re the first ones, we show people how to do it. Let’s just keep doing it. And there’s a, you know, there’s a point to that thinking but there’s a very dangerous point to that logic too where people who stick too much to that, I think are being a little bit unhistorical because if you look at the history of US democracy, it actually evolves a lot. The early form that we use is nowhere near like what we do today. And I can just point to obvious things like women voting, blacks voting, blacks being free. You know when we first started governors weren’t elected, they were appointed. Senators weren’t elected, they were appointed. So we’ve changed our democracy in a whole bunch of ways. So some of the people who say well you know we shouldn’t touch the system because this works so good for us. They’re a bit missing the point that one of the reasons this works so good for us is because we keep touching it. We keep fixing it. We keep improving it. But we are a bit stagnant now, I think. Our institutions have become locked in. If you tried to measure change in American Political institutions; I don’t know exactly how you do that. But I’m pretty sure across a lot of metrics you’d see that we haven’t, we’ve been fairly static for a while now.

Stephan Kyburz: Coming back closer to the book, what is,kind of, your vision or how do you see direct democracy implemented in a different way in the US? Or how would you see a path forward?

John Matsusaka: The main thing I suggest in the book is that we’ve got this problem right now where the voters are feeling a bit disconnected, that they don’t have control over the laws. So there’s no magic bullet. There’s no secret that’s going to make it all go away. It isn’t so simple. It’s going to take a whole bunch of different things. If we just take the United States, you mentioned some, we have a bunch of creaky institutions. The electoral college is weird. Okay, this weird thing where the voters in the states pick other people to go pick the president. Nobody would design a democracy like that now. That’s a vestige of 250 years ago. This strange thing where we have senators, 2 senators from every state, even giant states have 2 and tiny states have 2. Nobody would design that either. So we have a bunch of creaky things. But I’m not really about that. Although those are important. What I suggest is, one of the things we should think about that we could get some mileage from is to actually let people vote more on the laws that are actually coming before them. And in the United States particularly let them vote on some national laws. And that would solve a whole bunch of problems I believe. It would first make people feel that they do have more control, because they would. I believe it would also reduce some of the polarization that is creating great stress in our political system right now. Because the polarization is, what it comes down to, is parties moving to extremes, to really unreasonable extremes in my opinion, in most cases, and really not representing the American public. If you look at opinion surveys on almost any issue, the American public is generally approximately centrist. For example and I’ve written bunch of Op-Eds about this recently, but take the issue of abortion. There is very few americans that want to have an outright ban on abortion. At the same time there are very few americans who want to have abortion be allowed unconditionally. The huge majority of Americans want to have it allowed in the beginning but restricted to some degree once the fetus becomes viable. So the great majority of Americans are in the middle on this issue. The parties and the politicians have staked out super extreme positions where they want to go, they want to go to one of these two things. And that makes our entire rhetoric corrosive and it’s sort of empty at some sense. And it’s not just that issue. It’s immigration. It’s… you can name all the issues. The virtue of voting on issues is that it would allow the American public to force a little more maturity into the discussions and things like compromise and moving to the center would come to the fore. And the American public would say: well we actually want some centrist policies here. We’re going to show you this. I believe that would, by a trickle down approach, make some of the politicians realize: okay I can actually go in this direction. Because I suspect some of them might want to but they think they can’t. They can say: well look, I’m just going where the American public is going. And they want compromise. So I think it would provide cover for a lot of politicians to then move, not to the ideal center, but to move off the kind of crazy extremes that we’re seeing on the left and the right right now. So again I don’t want to suggest that that would be a panacea for all the problems but I think it would be a step in the right direction and heal some things. I’d like to see it go in small steps. So I guess as an American I am a conservative too. I don’t want to do crazy experiments on a structure that’s worked well. I want to go in small steps and see how they work. I think a very easy small step for the US is that the congress could call an advisory vote on an issue of the day. For example, I suggest in my book, we argue a lot about immigration and there’s kind of 2 extreme positions. One is, you know, let’s build a wall and seal off the borders. Another is well, you know, we have a lot of people illegally in the country here, let’s find a way to make them legal so that they can coexist here. Most Americans want to do some version of both. So why not take a vote? Give people the choices. Say, you know what? You guys want to seal off the borders. You guys want to kind of keep it almost open and legalize these people or you guys want to do something in the middle? I think you could do an advisory vote. So if something really bad happens you’re not stuck with that at this point and you don’t have to amend the constitution to do an advisory vote. The congress could just call it under its lawmaking powers and you could try this out. And the American people could say: hey do we like this or not. The elites could say: you know this seems like it’d be crazy or not. And people could see it. I believe that when people try it they will say: oh actually, good idea. And they would want to do more of it and we’d learn, we would also learn. You know there actually is, there’s certain ways you don’t want to do it, that don’t work. Brexit in my book is an example of that. A good idea to take a vote? Absolutely.It’s a big decision. Why not let the people have their say on this. But the way it’s designed is not good, right? And so you learn that by doing it. So I would say through the same thing, let’s do some small steps in the US, take some tries, see how it works, eke out it. If people hate it then okay, we’re done. We tried it. We’ll move on to something else. I believe people will like it and then we can expand it out.

Stephan Kyburz: I think so too, that the institutional design is really important. You mentioned the Brexit vote which I think also was another good example of direct democracy and also I described that in a blog post actually I’ve written, on. Principles of Direct Democracy. And the way forward of small steps and introducing new institutions, one at a time, is actually a very solid way of developing institutions. Also if I compare it to actually the case of Switzerland, where you know initially in the first constitution there was an initiative process foreseen as an overall reform of the constitution, like a very, actually a very big step but it wasn’t that useful for the people, because people wanted to have like small changes in the constitution, for example, or ask for small changes. And then also the Referendum I think is even maybe the more important instrument because the people have a veto right when it comes to legislation. And I think that is often forgotten, that the direct democracy can be a veto with regards to legislation that is approved in parliament. And also this veto right actually, in Switzerland, is interesting because it makes politicians think about a possible Referendum and so they already include those threats to their legislation in the process. And I think that’s a very important element of direct democracy.

John Matsusaka: Switzerland is such a great example. I spend a lot of time talking to American audiences because this is where I am and part of my target. But Switzerland is such a great example to bring up. And Americans are very proud of their country but they don’t look outside the borders, maybe quite as much as they could. And so I’m often at talks and somebody will trot out some quote from one of the founders and they’ll say something like: well direct democracy has always resulted in anarchy and chaos. And they’ll pull out these quotes. And I’ll say: well have you guys been to Switzerland? Because it doesn’t look like a chaotic place to me right? I mean it looks like a perfectly free, prosperous society. So I think Switzerland is a great example. It’s also really interesting because there’s initiatives and referendums and everything at the national level at the canton level, which is state for us, audiences, at the local level. One thing I believe that in the US It’s not just the federal government where we can do more direct democracy. We can do it at the local level too. We can do it at the States. I wrote some stuff saying: you know what? We did all this stuff during Covid and all these policies came down and people got very upset. Some wanted more restricted policies, some wanted less and I said you know why didn’t, why don’t we just call for some votes on some of these things in our cities. If there’s a question about whether we want to reopen the schools or not, why don’t we take a vote? Why does it have to be an unelected health officer in a health department making a super important decision like that instead of the voters? So I think that once people get the mindset that it’s our society and we have to live with the consequences of these important decisions, so we ought to be participating in them. I think once it becomes instinctive then we’ll start to vote on more things and I think we’ll get better decisions and it’ll be happier. But I think at least in this country there’s… and not just us, but maybe in a lot of other countries other than Switzerland, people naturally think: well you know elected officials or bureaucrats make decisions. We only periodically get to have a say in these things. But there’s no reason that has to be the case.

Stephan Kyburz: And as you write, also in the book, I think it’s a great way of settling issues. You know you can have huge discussions around legislation or any proposal and then once the vote is through there is… Actually also, at least in Switzerland, there is really an acceptance of that decision. It doesn’t mean that the topic comes up again and that you can, you know, change previous decisions. And I think that’s also an important element of direct democracy that if the people have taken a certain decision at some point there should be the possibility to change or I meant that decision at the later point. And I think, like, the design. The design is really important.

John Matsusaka: This is something that I think is also not well appreciated, but direct democracy has this settling feature to it that decisions made by non-elected officials, which is what most of our things don’t have. And it really is harmful to your society if you argue about an issue over and over and over without coming to a conclusion. It’s important to get the issue right but sometimes it’s just as important just to get some closure on the issue and move on. And I’ve written about abortion in this country and I think it’s an issue that in some respects, this is a bit over-dramatic, but in some respects has tore apart a lot of our our politics because it became such a polarizing issue. And that was because it was a decision made by unelected judges in my opinion. And so it was never really viewed as final or as legitimate by the losers. So they always were thinking: well this isn’t really what the people want. It’s these unelected guys. If we could get control of them we could switch it back. You know I think the United States in some ways is very unique in that we fought so stridently over this issue for 50 years. In every other democracy they had arguments. They took votes. The majority ruled and they moved on. And that seems like a healthy way to do it. We did it in a very unhealthy way. So let’s take Brexit because that’s another one you mentioned. There’s problems with the way they did it in my opinion. But I think at least it’s settled the issue. Every generation gets to make its own way. So it’ll come back around in 20 years, the next generation can decide what they want to do. But at least it took it off their radar so they can move on to think about some other things. That’s a healthy aspect of it and the reason it settles is because the losers, if the majority votes against you the losers tend to say: yeah I it’s not what I wanted but that’s the rules of the game and I lost and so let me try to win something else. Which they don’t feel if it’s coming out of some other process. So I think Brexit you know again, it was obviously a long tortuous episode for the UK, for that episode. But I think the one virtue is in some sense it settles the issue for now, they can move on.

Stephan Kyburz: What I think also… Well the two points I think but that were problematic with the Brexit referendum: one was that it was top down initiated so it was like used as a political tool and almost like as a political strategy for the conservatives. And obviously Cameron did want to rule out this discussion and also the pressure he felt from the right. But then it backfired. And then the other thing, what was missing there was that there was only this initial decision but there could have been the subsequent decisions taken by the people. Also in terms of how should Brexit actually look like.

John Matsusaka: I think that Cameron had the option. It was proposed to him to take two votes and one was going to be on the concept and then one was going to be back on the actual details. And apparently he declined that because he thought he was going to win on the first round, as we all know, and he didn’t want to give people a second bite. But they put the British public in a really awkward position, that you’re voting on something and you don’t know what it actually is. You’re voting on a concept and as we know the details make all the difference in how you exit. And so they ask people to vote on something and so the people don’t exactly know what they voted on and then the people that are charged to implement it don’t actually know what the people wanted because they didn’t present real options to people. So I think that was a problematic way. I would also say for issues like that of significant importance where you’re going to pivot off the status quo, I think there’s an argument for putting a higher threshold than say 51%. Maybe you say 55 or 60, because I think there’s a virtue to stability. It’s bad for people living in the world to have policies change all the time. I think that you want to build in a little bit of a bias for the status quo. So I think saying if we’re going to do something of that importance, we need 55%. I’m just picking a number. But the point is the super majority. I think that’s much safer because one of the problems of course comes out with Brexit with 51.5%. Yes, the losers still say: well yeah, just because of quirks in the rain or this or that, it would have gone the other way. So it’s not clear, if it was 55% nobody would have those arguments and it would be much easier for people to move on to.

Stephan Kyburz: And I think this design, it really matters. And you also in the book you actually make suggestions to how direct democracy could be designed, also at the national level in the US. So in general, do you think from an academic point of view, do you think there is enough design thinking or research on direct democracy? And also from my point of view, currently, there is so much discussion about Deliberative Democracy, Citizens Assemblies, Mini Publics which I think can be a great compliment to, also, the institutions that we have. But I almost feel like that direct democracy has fallen back in terms of research and design thinking.

John Matsusaka: In terms of design I actually think we know a ton about the details. I think if you look at States like California or cities, we could dig into Switzerland. I mean there’s all kinds of things that people have done there. People have been iterating on this process for, you know, Switzerland, what 170 years or something like that. The US it’s a long time too. So I think we know a lot about how to do this right. I think the bigger question is not sort of how to perfect it but how to get it in places that don’t that don’t have it. Because there’s a lot of places as I’ve already said at the national level, we don’t have it. In many states in the US we don’t have it. Many countries don’t have it where I think they might be better off having it. Having initiative rights would be a good thing. So I don’t think we’re from a scholarly point of view we’re flying blind in terms of actually how to do this. We just don’t have it in as many places. And you alluded earlier to the fact that there’s quite a few academics who don’t like it. And as we know from surveys the general public overwhelmingly likes this. That 30% that don’t like it, I conjecture, are almost all elites. Elites never like it. Elites, sometimes I worry if they even like democracy in general because they just fundamentally don’t trust the people. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, good point. 

John Matsusaka: They think that people are moody and emotional and given to terrible passions. They fundamentally don’t trust the people but they still want to say they believe in democracy. So I find them often torn up over those 2 things because you can’t have it both ways. Either you trust the people and you know they’re capable of choosing leaders and amending constitutions or they’re not. I don’t think you can do it both ways. The other thing you mentioned which is really interesting where we do need more research is, this isn’t exactly what you said, but I think it’s very much the thrust of what you said is what is technology going to do to democracy, and particularly direct democracy. Because technology is making it possible for people to sit in their homes or with their phones and vote on issues very often. And we know that technology has changed, transformed, is not, you know, is not an exaggeration. Many aspects of our lives in the last twenty years, it stands to reason it is going to transform the way we do our governments in a very dramatic way. I don’t think we can see yet what that is. But I believe we will for sure, we will be voting online. We will be voting through our phones at some point. We will be doing stuff like that. I think the notion that we’ll be on an ongoing basis, you know, every day we’ll be voting on some issue or something that will never happen and that would never be a good idea, in my opinion. People don’t want to be, people don’t want that much involvement with politics. But we do have the opportunity to have people do more than they’re doing right now. And I’m often approached by people who are entrepreneurs trying to think up ideas. They’re trying to develop apps, they’re trying to do things and this blurs very much into the participatory and the deliberative people because they’re all kind of in the same crowd, kind of thinking creatively. Where does democracy go? What’s the next thing? So I think that’s an area where we don’t have much research yet.

Stephan Kyburz: I agree with the technology there. Come many more opportunities, possibilities. On the other side, also, I see for example in Switzerland that trust, again, trust is very important when it comes to technology. So even though it would be possible to hold all you know, like direct democratic decisions, by now, electronically the people and also the politicians they are very careful in proposing to change to electronic solutions because if trust is lost then a lot more would be lost then direct democracy. This also brings back the question of the balance between representative democracy and direct democracy. As you say, people probably don’t want to vote like every day on issues and also I think the deliberative part is important, that people actually have time and the media has time and politicians have time to discuss issues and to present the arguments and technology could also bring the danger that we actually are overwhelmed with with decisions and therefore again I think the design is really really crucial.

John Matsusaka: What you said is a really funny thing because we thought that the internet and all this stuff would make it so easy for us to to get informed and actually we’re now flooded with information so we don’t know what to, we don’t know how to process it because we have so much right? We have so much information. Our problem is that we know how we find the good stuff amongst all the bad out there. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly exactly. So again for you, the way forward, or where do you see the next steps in the development of direct democracy?

John Matsusaka: Well I think the more that people use it and try it I think the better. As far as if we just take the US, since that’s what I’ve done the most writing about, I certainly think if we could have a national vote, once or twice, I think that would be a huge step forward. An advisory vote would be a huge step forward. And that’s eminently doable. And it’s not… there was a congressman who was later the majority leader who actually every year he would introduce a bill to that effect. Someone named Dick Geppert and he proposed that every commission. And every three years it would pick I think 3 issues that would go to the voters for an advisory vote. Now he never got any traction on this issue but he was a very serious person and so you could well imagine something like that. Let’s have a citizen petition on, a citizen panel or maybe put some politicians on there or some eminent, doesn’t matter who it is, from my point of view just put some eminent people that the voters respect and have them come up with 3 issues and ask the voters what they think of these issues and then once the voters actually speak let’s see how the political system reacts. It’s kind of like taking a poll and people sometimes say: well, why do we need to do this? We can do opinion polls and there’s a real difference because on an opinion poll somebody’s calling people up and asking them about something that they may or may not have yet thought much about or formed an opinion on. The difference is if you’re voting, before the time you vote, you’re exposed to an intense campaign. So if we were to have a vote in the US there would be very intense campaign, voters would get bombarded and they would get to hear both sides of the argument. They haven’t really thought about some of these issues sometimes and if they’ve heard they’ve maybe only heard one side of their argument, their tribe’s argument. They would be bombarded by these things and they would actually reflect on it. And they would cast, I suspect, a very different vote than you would get in a poll. Also because when it’s a poll sometimes you just want to… you’re kind of shouting. You’re just venting a little bit but if people thought: oh these guys might listen to what I say here they might tack it a little bit, I suspect as well. So I think actually voting is very different than an opinion poll and you know we know this kind of, another way we know this is that  if you look at ballot propositions, if you look at the first poll anybody takes on an issue and you look at the final election vote it’s often very different. Some things can be wildly popular when you’re out, when you poll it and then you let a campaign run and you have people vote and they totally switch. They go from massive support to massive no, for example. So that’s yet another example why voting is really different than polling.

Stephan Kyburz: The voting brings this reflection about the topic and people informing themselves. It’s actually, I mean in Switzerland that’s I think true. You always could think about you know, how you want to inform people more. But actually thinking about a topic also, politically, is I think very Interesting. 

Stephan Kyburz: So yeah, Thanks a lot for sharing your insights and your opinions and I will definitely link to your work, to your research and also to the book. But besides that do you have any articles or other books that you’d recommend on the topic?

John Matsusaka:  I’m sort of a huge believer in reading about history because I think that we get bombarded with current stuff and we don’t really realize the context of what we’re doing and we tend to magnify as we think about what’s happening and how to fix it. We focus, I think, too much on things that happened in the last 3 or 4 years. It’s very hard to see the sweep of what’s really happening around us. And it really matters because how we think about things, you know, if you think that the stress in American democracy right now is caused by Donald Trump then the solution is simple, get Trump out of the picture and we go back to this imaginary happy land beforehand. But if you think it has deeper roots you think about it very differently. So I’m a big believer in history. I can mention many, many things. But I think Keyssar’s book “On the right to vote” is a great, just history of the United States and shows how much evolution we have. Sean Wilentz, a history at Princeton, wrote a great book called the rise, I think it’s “The rise of American democracy”. You know it’s not like reading, it’s not gonna be, It’s not going to be for everyone. But if you want to read how much has changed and the battles that were fought and kind of how those were done I think that’s great. I guess what I don’t recommend, this maybe I can do you do it more negative, there’s a class of books out there that I’m not going to name that are big think about democracy, how to save or democracy is dying or these or sort of things. These things I think would be very tempting for people to read because it sounds so, it’s so sexy and they’re going to tell you this big picture thing. When I look through those I guess I find a lot of them not actually very well grounded in the science of things and in the history of things. They’re very much reactive in the short run. So I guess I would not recommend those. I would say if people have time I would say try to go back to some core stuff because I think you’ll get more, more deeper lessons from reading some history.

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah I agree and I think we are on the same page with regard to some other books. And I think also I, you know, reading about the history of democratic institutions in Switzerland for example, gave me so many insights and so much knowledge. So I think that’s a very good recommendation. And yeah I’ll link to these other resources. And yeah, thanks a lot John for taking the time to be a guest on the Rules of the Game podcast. I really enjoyed the conversation.

John Matsusaka: Thank you for having me on. It’s really fun to talk about these topics. These are important things and they’re really interesting. So great. Glad you’re doing this.

Stephan Kyburz: And to everyone I recommend the book “Let the people rule”. I think it’s a great overview of direct democracy and how we could make it work. 

John Matsusaka: Okay, very good. Thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it.