Politica 1, 1994 book review:

Marcus Schmidt, Direct Democracy in Denmark. About the introduction of an electronic second chamber (in Danish), Copenhagen: Nyt Nordisk Forlag Arnold Busck, 1993

The appearance of this book has been favored a great deal widespread media-coverage. It has been dealt with thoroughly by the dailies as well as by television. This is quite comprehensible: Not only is the book easily read and well-written, it also contains an adequate deal of provoking comments and points of view often directed against politicians mentioned by name. The author has a message which is quite popular in these days.

One single time, however, his engagement inflicts his precision and an error slips in (page 64). In a hurry the result of the election in 1979 is proclaimed a big defeat to the Social Democratic Party - actually the party made good progress.

The main message of the book is a settlement with the existing, representative parliamentary system and a recommendation of the introduction of a higher degree of direct democracy. First of all this should be realised with an "electronic second chamber". This electronic second chamber should be a MiniDenmark: a panel consisting of 70,000 randomly selected voters officiated for one year at a time. Members of the panel are supposed to vote on all Bills voted on by the Parliament, including those defeated by the Parliament. If the result of MiniDenmark's election is equal to that of the Parliament, the fate of the Bill is sealed. If the majority of MiniDenmark vote opposite the majority of the Parliament, the whole electorate has to make the final decision. The voting of  MiniDenmark is done by means of a push-button telephone to a voice response computer being able to render the question put to the vote in normal speech and to register a "yes" or a "no", which is transmitted by pushing certain buttons on the phone - therefore the designation "The Electronic Second Chamber". Such systems are developed and tested in connection with marketing researches and in this field the author of the book is a pioneer in Denmark.

With regard to content, the book is divided in three parts: First, a number of arguments in favour of the functionality of the proposed system. Second, a number of arguments for the desirability of the system as seen from a democratic point of view. And finally, a number of arguments aimed towards the objections often used by the opponents of direct democracy.

In his discussion about the practical aspects, the author is most set on convincing the reader that by asking a panel of 70,000 people a certain question, it is possible to get a true reflection of the opinion of the whole popular vote. The questions discussed in this connection and the results presented are familiar to many people through elementary theories about random sampling and well-known renderings of questionnaire design.

However, a lot of other practical problems are connected with the proposed "Electronic Second Chamber". For instance: how does such a system ensure that only the right persons vote, i. e.  the members of the panel and not somebody else? The author suggests that one uses some kind of an ID code, but this should not consist a problem to a hacker. Moreover, how does one guarantee that the members stay anonymous thus feeling secure against a continuous registration of their votes somewhere in the system and against the inconvenience such a registration would entail? Furthermore, how does one guarantee convincingly that the results of an electronic election are not manipulated by? It does not take many lines of computer programming making it impossible for the fraction of voters in favor of a Bill to exceed, say 30%, no matter how many people push the yes-button! It might have been more interesting to get the author's opinion about the solution to such problems rather than have him provide a detailed budget for establishing and operating such a system (in case someone is interested, the costs totals approximately 5.6 billions  DKK a year).

I suppose that it will be of great importance to the popular acceptance of the system and its results as being regarded legitimate, that the problems addressed right above can be solved. Moreover, an accept of the system implies that people feel that the problems are solved in a reassuring way.

This is perhaps not the least part of the problem. The old-fashioned system with crosses on a ballot paper, polling booths, ballot boxes and manual counting of the votes works in a way which everybody understands, just like everybody understands how it is secured against breaches of anonymity and against bungling with the results. Seeing it by yourself, you are actually convinced that everything is done correctly. This possibility does not exist in connection with the electronic system. In this case the population must rely on statements and evaluations of experts.

Why does the author want his system introduced? Well, his answer to this question is extremely simple: It is more democratic than representative democracy. He does not think highly of the Danish parliamentary system, as it is today. The "ritual semi   candocracy" (p. 62) he calls it with a certain preference for rarely used collocations of foreign words. His main complaint against the parliamentarians is that considering demographic characteristics, they do not reflect the population, and thus they often make decisions which a majority of the electorate - according to the polls - are against.

In this part of the discussion a clarification of the author's conception of democracy is certainly missing. So is an awareness of the existence of a number of competing conceptions of democracy. The fact that Robert A. Dahl, one of the central figures of modern democracy, is not mentioned one single time, is symptomatic - despite the fact that the author is not unfamiliar with political literature in general.

I suppose that the author measures democracy by the degree to which the decisions made conform to the preferences of the electorate. The better the system is at transforming individual utility functions to a societal utility function the more democratic the system is.

If this view upon democracy is made the basis of the whole issue, we get to the paradoxical result that it would be undemocratic to implement the author's proposal - according to a poll there is no majority in favour of the push-button democracy. Although the author takes up a critical attitude towards persons like Locke, Rousseau and others indicating that the majority's will and the common good are not necessarily are congruent phenomena in all situations, he, however, seems ready to make an exception in this instance.

A number of objections against direct democracy are slashed with a clear pleasure by the author and he lacks some positive attitude toward the subject. As there are so few historical examples to base it upon, the discussion about the advantages of direct democracy in practice is made difficult. Quite often people mention the Athenian democracy as a model. Just as the author of this book does it.

Actually Mogens Herman Hansen's book on the issue is the single work most quoted across the book. It is barely a surprise to anyone that the author praises the Athenian system which certainly has been the framework of great efforts. The issue is just whether this was because the Athenian democracy was a direct democracy where everybody (men) could take part in passing the resolutions (as the author tends to think). Perhaps it was because the Athenian democracy allowed for a competition among the elite and thus made it possible for leaders such as Pericles to come to power due to their control of the popular assembly.