[simonh]

The problem with direct democracy is that nobody implementing popularly mandated policies has a stake in successfully implementing them. There's no personal commitment. In contrast if a politician or party proposes policies and gets elected, everybody knows who is responsible for implementing those policies successfully, and the electorate can and will hold them accountable for it. In an ideal direct democracy where all decisions are made by popular vote, the leaders implementing those policies are reduced to functionaries. Even if they supported some measures, they're still going to be expected to implement other measures they disagree with. We had that here in Britain recently and it's a recipe for political paralysis.

[bluefirebrand]

> the electorate can and will hold them accountable for it

In theory. In practice is this what we're actually seeing?

In Canada at least, I don't think political parties are being held accountable for the promises they make during election campaigns. There is a huge tendency to promise the moon and deliver the status quo.

[simonh]

In practice the electorate has to make a pragmatic selection between the choices available to them. Once party leadership and policies emerge, those are your choices, neither may be ideal but that's what you've got. You might very well suspect the politician you vote for won't achieve everything they want to, but maybe they'll deliver more than the other politicians. That sounds terrible, and it's not great, but at least it's realistic.

In direct democracy there's the illusion of zero compromise, you can end up with whatever wacky or amazing combination of initiatives you like, but in reality compromises still have to be made and priorities are going to conflict with each other. Somebody still need to implement all of that.

I just think it makes sense that the person (or party) doing the implementation and deciding on the compromises should be the person who made the commitment.