However, one then remembers the direct democracy in California and is no longer so sure. Not that the Californian direct democracy is necessarily bad, but it shows no spectacular results either.
Two points:
Californian direct democracy is bad. Very bad. The two biggest problems, currently, are Prop 13, which makes it unaffordable for any city to allow housing to be built, and Prop 26, which requires that the legislature have a supermajority to increase any tax or fee. But these are symptoms of a larger problem which is that it routinely puts nice-sounding ideas up for a vote, ideas which would be catastrophic in practice for complex reasons, and it takes heroic efforts to prevent them from becoming law that the legislature cannot amend.
You are missing a large difference between Switzerland and California that is much more likely to be relevant than the differences you note: Size. California has 40 million people in 160,000 square miles; Switzerland has 8 million in 16,000 square miles. (The population difference is the crucial one, but the large difference in land area shouldn’t be discounted.) It certainly doesn’t help that the US systems for devolution don’t have nearly the granularity that Switzerland does, but the core problem is that California is ungovernably large.
The way I have seen this idea stated in the past (e.g. quadratic cost of all-to-all communication) was that the organization lacing a hierarchical structure would fall apart at quite a small size, maybe somewhere around ~100 people.
If one wants to use it to explain the different outcomes between Switzerland and California, they have to explain why something would work for 8 million people (which is not at all a negligible number) and 40 million. What exactly happens at, say, 20 million boundary that breaks the system?
A government has a different problem than just bureaucracy; it has to aggregate preferences from a much larger group in order to do its job. The aggregation of needs, preferences, and other important information just gets harder as the group to be governed gets bigger. I think it’s faster than quadratic, as well; I’d expect that first, second, and probably third derivatives are all strictly increasing functions of population; for a bureaucracy with no customers/clients outside itself the first derivative is positive and usually the second, but probably not the third.
But that would only push the upper limit on efficient governance downwards, no? So the limit would not be 100 people, but rather 30. Still, the question we are discussing is whether there’s a limit somewhere between 8 million and 40 million, which is like five orders of magnitude difference.
What about direct democracy in Oregon, does it work well with its 4 millions people? And in Colorado and North Dakota?
I’m also wondering whether proportional vote is important for the Swiss direct democracy to function acceptably, the last canton, Grisons, that did not elect its legislature proportionally just reformed recently.
In California, with the majority vote and the subsequent two-party system, there is such a high contrast between the ideologies prevalent in society and the mix of ideologies in the State legislature that the relation between the civil society and the legislature can only be conflictual (conflictuality which is already inherently fostered by the majority vote).
It would also be interesting to know whether in California direct democracy works better at the county and municipal level.
Anyhow, I would still prefer to live in a state with direct democracy than without it, even with Prop 13 and Prop 26, no doubt whatsoever about this.
Two points:
Californian direct democracy is bad. Very bad. The two biggest problems, currently, are Prop 13, which makes it unaffordable for any city to allow housing to be built, and Prop 26, which requires that the legislature have a supermajority to increase any tax or fee. But these are symptoms of a larger problem which is that it routinely puts nice-sounding ideas up for a vote, ideas which would be catastrophic in practice for complex reasons, and it takes heroic efforts to prevent them from becoming law that the legislature cannot amend.
You are missing a large difference between Switzerland and California that is much more likely to be relevant than the differences you note: Size. California has 40 million people in 160,000 square miles; Switzerland has 8 million in 16,000 square miles. (The population difference is the crucial one, but the large difference in land area shouldn’t be discounted.) It certainly doesn’t help that the US systems for devolution don’t have nearly the granularity that Switzerland does, but the core problem is that California is ungovernably large.
It is my long-standing contention that the coordination costs to keep an organization well-directed scale superlinearly with the size of the organization, and particularly that this increases much faster than the amount of labor available within the organization. I believe this explains most problems people experience with government and large corporations.
The way I have seen this idea stated in the past (e.g. quadratic cost of all-to-all communication) was that the organization lacing a hierarchical structure would fall apart at quite a small size, maybe somewhere around ~100 people.
If one wants to use it to explain the different outcomes between Switzerland and California, they have to explain why something would work for 8 million people (which is not at all a negligible number) and 40 million. What exactly happens at, say, 20 million boundary that breaks the system?
A government has a different problem than just bureaucracy; it has to aggregate preferences from a much larger group in order to do its job. The aggregation of needs, preferences, and other important information just gets harder as the group to be governed gets bigger. I think it’s faster than quadratic, as well; I’d expect that first, second, and probably third derivatives are all strictly increasing functions of population; for a bureaucracy with no customers/clients outside itself the first derivative is positive and usually the second, but probably not the third.
But that would only push the upper limit on efficient governance downwards, no? So the limit would not be 100 people, but rather 30. Still, the question we are discussing is whether there’s a limit somewhere between 8 million and 40 million, which is like five orders of magnitude difference.
Where is part 3?
Here (i just entered the authors profile and it’s one of the newest posts, directly above part 2)
What about direct democracy in Oregon, does it work well with its 4 millions people? And in Colorado and North Dakota?
I’m also wondering whether proportional vote is important for the Swiss direct democracy to function acceptably, the last canton, Grisons, that did not elect its legislature proportionally just reformed recently.
In California, with the majority vote and the subsequent two-party system, there is such a high contrast between the ideologies prevalent in society and the mix of ideologies in the State legislature that the relation between the civil society and the legislature can only be conflictual (conflictuality which is already inherently fostered by the majority vote).
It would also be interesting to know whether in California direct democracy works better at the county and municipal level.
Anyhow, I would still prefer to live in a state with direct democracy than without it, even with Prop 13 and Prop 26, no doubt whatsoever about this.