Voting for people means you can hold them accountable. They lay out their policies, if you trust the person and like their policies you vote them in. If they under-perform you vote them out. Along with a separation of powers to limit abuses, it works very well.
Voting for specific policies directly is often disastrous. Look at the way voter initiatives ring fence high levels of spending while also restricting taxation. Look at how Brexit became such a dumpster fire because a government and an elected parliament was compelled to try to implement a policy the government and a majority of MPs disagreed with. Voting for things not people inevitably creates a breakdown in responsibility, especially for complex policies that could be implemented in many ways and involve difficult trade offs.
I’m not against referendums in principle, they can work, but only if they are seeking permission to implement a policy supported by the government that is calling the referendum. In that situation the lines of responsibility are clear, and for an important decision it can make sense to hold a referendum.
I'm not 100% convinced that direct democracy is a good idea either. It has its own problems, as you point out.
Still, this part:
> if you trust the person and like their policies you vote them in. If they under-perform you vote them out
absolutely doesn't work in practice. One, there's no way to build trust at the scale elections are held. For any given politician, you can have maybe a couple hundred people who know them who could actually trust them. Everything above that requires transitive trust - trusting someone who trusts that politicians. However, in my experience, in the general population, the proper chain of trust isn't happening. People trust media outlets, which they have no basis to trust.
Compounding the problem is that in some countries, you aren't even voting for people, you're voting for parties. At the moment, there is no political party on the planet I would trust to do a good job in governance.
There are a lot of failure modes in the democratic system; it's probably worthy of a dense textbook (and I'm sure someone has written one). The incentive structures, the feedback loops, are all wrong for delivering good decisions. The only redeeming aspect of democracy in my eyes is that it's designed to enable bloodless transition of power. And, while I suppose that this makes it the best system, I'd really love if we could figure out a way to make it stop consistently producing idiocy.
It demonstrably does, elected leaders get voted out in well functioning democracies all the time. Do some incumbents hang on longer than seems right? Yes, but who gets to decide how long is right? The voters, whether you or I like it or not. Sometimes the voters screw up, but that's their right and it's their right to correct that if they choose to or not if they don't.
For me the key is to be a floating voter. Do not buy into the group-think tribalism of party loyalty, it's a mug's game. I say that, but I've voted for the same part here in the UK except for twice, but to me those two times are crucial. They were actually painful choices to make, but important decisions. To be honest I have also voted on party lines and regretted it. Those two times should really be three.
I really don't like representative democracy where you're voting for a list. It puts power in the hands of party committees, and makes those actually elected beholden to those who put them on the list. Elected officials should never be exposed to that kind of leverage.
In a pseudo-democracy policy priorities are defined exclusively by the oligarchy, and the required opinions are sold to voters through media channels directed by think tanks and PR outfits.
Voters are persuaded they have a choice over personalities and superficial issues, but never over national policy.
If a politician appears to threaten the cosy consensus, the media wurlitzer goes into overdrive to smear them, talk them down, and persuade voters that they're "extremist", "not electable", and other stock tropes.
So - it doesn't matter if leaders are voted out if key policy goals never change. And as a rule they either don't, or they change in ways that benefit the oligarchs, not the majority of the population.
> It demonstrably does, elected leaders get voted out in well functioning democracies all the time.
That doesn't mean it works in practice. It may mean your electorate is tuning in to the media noise. The end result is usually that no long-term improvements happen in the country, because the first thing a new government does is undo the reforms and cancel the programs of the previous one.
> For me the key is to be a floating voter. Do not buy into the group-think tribalism of party loyalty, it's a mug's game.
That's table stakes for any human being with more than half a brain (unfortunately, most people aren't like that). But then you hit another problem. Last two elections (one internal and one for EU MEPs), I decided to learn more about the available choices of political parties and their programs. And I came from this with a firm belief that I cannot, in good conscience, support any single one of them. That's the negative side of voting for people, parties and programs. You don't get to express your true beliefs - you can only vote for the lesser evil, or abstain.
Yes, which refutes the claim I was responding to. Everyone thinks the problem isn't their representative, it's all the others. Which means they never hold their representative--the only one whom they have control over with their votes--accountable.
I'm willing to bet there is a study about the effects of letting people who are elected be involved in the process of re-drawing the districts they are elected from.
I'm in the UK and frankly the level of gerrymandering in the US is appalling. I mean it's your system, I hesitate to judge generally speaking, but OMG is your system of redistricting screwed up.
Voting for specific policies directly is often disastrous. Look at the way voter initiatives ring fence high levels of spending while also restricting taxation. Look at how Brexit became such a dumpster fire because a government and an elected parliament was compelled to try to implement a policy the government and a majority of MPs disagreed with. Voting for things not people inevitably creates a breakdown in responsibility, especially for complex policies that could be implemented in many ways and involve difficult trade offs.
I’m not against referendums in principle, they can work, but only if they are seeking permission to implement a policy supported by the government that is calling the referendum. In that situation the lines of responsibility are clear, and for an important decision it can make sense to hold a referendum.