I think Brexit can also be seen as an argument for more direct democracy: if there had been a referendum in the UK on one or more of the major changes in the EU treaties in the previous 25 years, I think it's likely that Brexit wouldn't have happened, or else that it would have happened much earlier with less damage as a result.
Speaking as a Californian, where our ballot is always filled with propositions [1] [2], I can confidently say this is a bad idea. I think it works tolerably well for issues that are something an average citizen can understand with a little research, but otherwise just ends up as dueling propaganda campaigns.
For example, this year San Francisco voted to decide whether one of the major streets through Golden Gate Park should remain mostly car free after we tried that for the pandemic. That seems like a fine use. But there was a state prop titled "REQUIRES ON-SITE LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL AT KIDNEY DIALYSIS CLINICS AND ESTABLISHES OTHER STATE REQUIREMENTS. INITIATIVE STATUTE." This was some sort of high-dollar fight among vested interests fought via sketchy ballot proposition and it absolutely should not have been on the ballot.
(You also can quickly run into tyranny-of-the-majority issues. E.g., famously liberal and tolerant California in 2008 voted to strip an already-existing civil right from a minority. [3])
For complex issues, I think it's better to have the decision-making concentrated in the hands of highly supervised professionals with staffs who have the time to understand the issues enough so that they have a chance of understanding the impacts. Rather than more direct democracy, what I'd like to see is more transparency and accountability for those professionals.
Brexit wasn't based on actual harm caused by EU treaties. It was caused by bigotry, fear over economic issues being very deliberately misdirected due to propaganda, and a host of outright lies on the part of the Leave campaign.
I see you're getting downvoted, but as an American who followed the whole mess remotely, that sounds about right to me. The only thing I'd add was that I think it started as intra-party infighting and political dramatics that got wildly out of control.
I wish I could have this level of optimism. If US voters actually wanted all of these things, there is absolutely no way that the margins in congress would be as razor thin as they are, gerrymandering or not.
Literally the effect of gerrymandering is that a set of people who share both ideology and party get more voting power.
It's pretty clear that the average Republican in the US has been galvanized into partnership, so the members of that party will very likely vote cohesively with each other.
It's also pretty clear that the same is not happening in the Democratic party. Most Democratic voters I hear from disagree with one another ideologically, and do not feel effectively represented by their party. It is not likely that voters in the Democratic party will vote cohesively with one another.
The effect of that applied to gerrymandering is that districts over-representing republicans take advantage of the average Republican voter cohesion, while districts that over-represent the Democratic party do not.
Voter cohesion is the strongest vector for outcomes I can think of in our first-past-the-post representative voting system.
It's my contention that changing the structure of our voting system or factoring out gerrymandering would have a drastic effect on legislative outcomes.
That would be great, but it assumes that there wouldn't (continue to) be massive voter suppression by the right wing, guaranteeing that their pet issues win in most of the south and midwest.
Obviously if people didn't support it then it would be repealed. That doesn't make it a good law. It is directly responsible for the housing affordability crisis in california. That's good for homeowners so they won't repeal it, but it's very bad for the state and everyone else. Which is the whole point here, direct democracy leads to 51% of the population shafting the other 49%.
> That's good for homeowners so they won't repeal it, but it's very bad for the state and everyone else.
Homeowners are a big part of the state. "everyone else" must be a small minority. If you think it is a big enough part of the population, feel free to bring a prop to repeal prop 13. My bet is that any attempt to repeal it will lose in a landslide based on what happened in 2020[1] when they attempted a partial repeal.
> Which is the whole point here, direct democracy leads to 51% of the population shafting the other 49%.
Notice that prop 15 lost by 4%... It is not good for the state as a whole, but it is good for the 52% of the voters that own a home. So now 48% of the state and everyone that wants to move to california is fucked because 9 million people want their home value to keep increasing. They've effectively voted in a law that requires non homeowners to pay homeowners $500 a year and burn another $500 due to lost economic efficiency. Is that good for homeowners? I guess, but it's certainly bad for the state.
If 52% of people in alabama wanted to bring back slavery does that make it the right thing to do?
The result of Brexit referenda can be attributed to caging away citizens from a democratic decision-making process on the things that matter. It was a vote of contempt not on the matter. If more referenda were held, the contempt for the lack of democracy would fade away as it's in Switzerland.
>The result of Brexit referenda can be attributed to caging away citizens from a democratic decision-making process on the things that matter.
To be fair, the EU is partially responsible for that. Even if the UK had a form of direct democracy, EU rules would still dictate on many issues. Switzerland can only do what it does because it isn't part of the EU.
(Now, if the EU itself had a direct democracy (setting aside the practical issues with that) it would perhaps be different.)
I agree that the EU has contributed to outlawing democracy on several issues and has replaced it with bureaucracy. Like a silly thing where the city can't directly manage parking fees and needs to instantiate an independent profit-seeking business for that.
However, now after Brexit UK now opened itself to profit-seeking international relations which can be worse than EU-dictated bureaucracy.