Individual Opinion Formation in a Direct Democratic Campaign

The critics of direct democratic procedures typically presume that the bulk of the members of a present-day democratic polity fall considerably short of the ideal of a thinking, reasonable and deliberating citizen. Essentially, as Budge points out, ‘the case against direct democracy can be summed up as saying that ordinary citizens have little political sagacity or prudence, so that they will tend to make decisions hastily but also to be unreasonably attached to them’.Ian Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 59–61. According to the critics of direct democratic procedures, the problem is not only that citizens usually do not think and deliberate about the issues in question, the problem is above all that they lack the competence to do so in the first place. Thus Budge concludes: ‘Here is perhaps the nub of the whole argument against direct democracy: the mass of the citizens are not qualified to decide high policy, so they can be allowed to influence it only indirectly, by choosing those who are to decide rather than deciding themselves’.Budge, The New Challenge of Direct Democracy, p. 69. The point of the critics is that, as Sartori suggests, direct democracy ‘would quickly and disastrously founder on the reefs of cognitive incompetence’.Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revised (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), p. 120.