Forum Post: Direct Democracy in Switzerland excerpt

http://www.world-wide-democracy.net/SwissDD/SwissDD_1_5.html

Likewise, the sheer numerousness of the representatives, in relative terms, helps keep the body from degenerating into arrogance. At 240 members with seven million people, the Swiss ratio of representation is the equivalent of a U.S. Congress expanded from its present membership of 535 to some 18,000. This is not a trivial effect. It renders the entire system more accessible, and thus reinforces the objective of maintaining a people's government that so many other Swiss institutions also strive to preserve. By diffusing power, it renders the legislature less vulnerable to manipulation, whether by wealth, particular interests in the press, or by other pressures.

"There is almost no lobbying," Bryce wrote, and this remains largely true today. One strives to find listings of firms even resembling lobbyists in the Bern telephone directory. Associations of employers and labor unions, industries, environmentalists, and other groups exist but bear little resemblance to their counterparts in Washington, D.C. Many of these offices did not even employ a single full-time lobbyist, where their U.S. or European counterpart would typically have a whole battery of them. The sheer size of Switzerland, to be sure, plays a role in this, as does its relatively small federal government. Wary of the dangers of power and privilege, Jean-Jaques Rousseau, the French philosopher who proudly signed most of his manuscripts "a citizen of Geneva," once suggested that republics move their capital periodically - disrupting the cozy inertia and special relationships that tend to build up in any governing city. The combined policies of the Swiss toward their legislature have some of the impact of that, at less cost.

Underlying all these effects, of course, is the system of initiative and referendum that affects the Swiss political economy, and in a sense the whole culture, so broadly. This system is often described, even by the Swiss, as a kind of negative check upon the other political institutions. It is certainly that. It is, however, more than that. It creates a spiritual bond, and a sense of responsibility by the people - turning them all, in effect, into part-time legislators since in their many votes each year they wind up functioning in precisely that manner.

In the Swiss parliament, the influence of direct democracy can be seen by a whole sociology of popular orientation. Each member of the assembly thinks of himself as a teacher, and a teacher of the whole nation of citizens. No teacher who holds his pupils in contempt will succeed, or even stay long on the job; hence the pedagogical impulse, healthy and strong to begin with, is reinforced. As well, a teacher with any wisdom soon realizes he has much to learn from his pupils. The instruction is no longer one way - particularly when the classroom is an intelligent one like the Swiss people, and the teacher a humble, part-time instructor who thinks himself a citizen, not a sovereign.

Thus, to attempt to transplant merely the policies that directly govern "parliament" itself, such as campaign finance or pay and staff provisions, to other democracies, might produce disappointing results if done without establishing some kind of initiative and referendum system, or other arrangements that would emulate its effects. One can make an excellent case for reforming the U.S. or the European legislatures even if only by means of some of those narrower measures. They would not, however, work in exactly the same way as in Switzerland, for there, every political relationship is subtly changed by the system of direct democracy.

It may be that the other democracies, given how far their institutions are from this populist faith in the wisdom of the electorate, must limit themselves to cruder measures. Or that to reach a state of refinement as great as the Swiss model, that they would have to pass through intermediary stages in which the faculty of popular voting and control could be built up gradually.

In a sense, the roots go deeper even than the practice of national and cantonal referendum. The Swiss institution of direct democracy, after all, stretches back over time, and at the same time is brought forward in the continuation of the ancient popular assemblies.

Carlo Schmid-Sutter, who has served in the national senate, has a grasp on the Swiss conception when he describes the Landsgemeinde as "the incarnation of the state, the place where all the citizens come together to act as a community." No representative assembly, however virtuous, can ever exactly capture that sensation. The Swiss, though, have achieved an unusually close approximation, in their parliament of citizens.