[xorfish]

* introduction of direct voting (e.g. reducing complex matters to yes/no decisions)

As a Swiss I have to comment on this.

First, is this really a right-wing point?

Where I vehemently disagree is with the sentiment carried with the "explanation" of direct democracy that you added.

Every parliament will boil down complex issues to "simple" yes/no decisions. Or how do you imagine a parliament can vote on anything?

Furthermore a right to a referendum is literally just consulting the people for a yes/no vote that already happened in the parliament. In Switzerland you need to collect a certain amount of signatures of voters within 100 days to mandate a public vote on the exact law that was passed by the parliament. Changes in the constitution mandate a referendum.

Another part of Swiss democracy are popular initiatives. You can propose a change to the constitution like adding "The State mandates a minimal wage". If you gather enough signatures the people will vote if they want to add this to the constitution. If it passes, the executive is required to propose laws that implement the change.

[bildung]

You have a good point! I don't have an opinion about direct voting per se, because, as you rightly pointed out, it seems to work just fine in Switzerland. In the context of German political culture, though, I'm pretty sceptical that we'd see results comparable to Switzerland. One point: Germany has very large differences in voting turnout split by income bracket in anything smaller than federal elections. Even in federal elections the difference is enormous: One example is Hamburg 2013, where about 50% of the poor voted, but 90% of the rich.[1] This obviously heavily skews the results. My impression is that Switzerland has lower differences in turnout by income bracket?

[1] = http://www.wahlbeteiligung2013.de/fileadmin/Inhalte/Studien/... - search for "Stadtbericht Hamburg"