[Tichy]

I vote pirate, but I don't believe in direct democracy for the very reasons you state. Also I see it as a job of politicians to free me from having to do politics myself.

I vote for them because of other things, like transparency and freedom of the web. Unfortunately there never is a political party that satisfies everyone's needs to a 100%. Maybe some kind of new system could be invented to fix that, though.

[Egregore]

It seems that in Switzerland they manage to live quite well with direct democracy.

[Tichy]

Not sure how they do it. I don't think they decide everything by direct democracy, there only is an option to start a direct vote for some issue? I think that is possible in Germany in some cases, too.

[nickik]

Just some basic points how it works:

Ways to creat a law (lets take banning video games). If you are in one of the two houses of parlament you can put in a motion that tells what it is you want to achive. This gets votet on by both houses and if it pases both it gets to the bundesrat (witch are just the 7 big ministers, one for law, one for inner, one for outer ....) they have to produce a acctual law bases on that motion. This law gets then voted on by both houses. If it passes you have a new law. Jet it often happens that somebody does not like such a law, if that happens the can take a "referendum" with means that the have to get (i think) 50'000 signatures and that forces a real vote with the hole country. That happens quite often because the "referendum" is pretty easy to do.

An example of this whas when they wanted to join the EG, the right wing took the referendum and won the vote after that.

The other way is more people driven. If you want something to happen (a basic income or prhibitation of minaretts) you have to collect (i think) 100'000 signatures and this then again results in a vote.

Simular systems exist on "kantons" level. Witch would be like state in the US or bundesland in germany. There are 26 of those but the processes in all of them are pretty diffrent.

On the smallest level you vote most on old school village meetings.

So its not direct democracy but its pretty easy to force a vote almost anything.Witch result in voting farly often.

The last time I think I had to vote on 7 issus on state level and 2 on kanton level.

Examples: "Stop building second appartment" - Sombody had an issue that there was to much building of houses that where mostly empty in small old mounten towns. I did not pass.

"Book Price Binding" - Basiclly the wantet that the publisher could dictate a price that every seller had to keep. Staat mandatet monopoly, that got crashed too.

"6 Week of Holydays for everybody" - that was crashed too,

Cant remember any others.

You can do all of this pretty easly with letters almost no work.

(btw this is only what I remember Im not sure if I got all of the prcesses right)