Edustajat, kansanäänestykset ja kansan tahto

Authors

• Eerik Lagerspetz

Abstract

Referenda are often opposed because voters are not considerd to be sufficiently competent and well-informed to make substantial political decisions. On the other hand, referenda are often supported because they are supposed to realize the will of the people, or the majority, better than decisions made in representative assemblies. In this paper, I try to show that neither of these common suppositions is necessary. In many cases, no one can be said to possess any special compentence to make decisions, or, at least we have no agreed method to recognize such compentence. Nevertheless, certain »paradoxes» of collective decisionmaking are even more disturbing in direct than in representative systems. They show that the alleged simplicity of direct democracy is largely an illusion. Referenda and similar devices can occasionally be useful, but they give us no solution to the riddle of democracy. Their performance could, however, be partly improved by (1) making them binding (not consultative), and (2) using more complex voting procedures.